Part
01
of fourteen
Part
01
OB/GYN Surgeon Persona: Pain and Caregivers
After an extensive search through medical databases, forums, and research firm directories, details about the relationship between a patient's caregiver and OB/GYN surgeons concerning pain management or prevention do not appear to be available in the public domain. However, the research team was able to gather valuable insights into opioid prescriptions for OB/GYN patients, patient safety, and patient concerns about pain management.
HELPFUL FINDINGS
- According to a Brunswick Hills OB/GYN, Dr. Elizabeth Cherot, "in addition to receiving more opioids, women are 40 percent more likely than men to become newly persistent opioid users following surgery."
- Women who give birth vaginally or without any complications are not given any opioid pain medication.
- Even though more than half of women go through a C-section, they are all provided with a non-opioid pain management option.
- According to a recent survey, nearly 9 out of 10 mothers or expecting mothers are concerned about opioid pain management. However, only 11% discussed a non-opioid option with their OB/GYN.
- According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), "pain management for postpartum patients should be individualized in a stepwise approach, and a multimodal approach including acetaminophen NSAIDs to opioids."
- Also, patient safety objectives by ACOG demand that there should be an environment at healthcare institutions where "all caregivers feel safe in reporting errors, near misses, and at-risk behaviors by themselves and others."
- Sleep deprivation of patient caregivers is recognized as a major obstacle in patient safety for OB/GYN patients.
RESEARCH STRATEGY:
We began our research by looking into specialized research repositories for any relevant studies to track data points about OB/GYN surgeons and their communication with patient caregivers concerning pain management. However, we couldn't find any such research requests. The only research we found focused on OB/GYN general surveys about the difficulty of pain management and the importance of patient consent in surgery.
Next, we looked into specialized medical databases and organizations, directly or indirectly related to OB/GYN surgery. We hoped to find reports or studies related to patient caregivers and OB/GYN surgeons' communication regarding pain management. Even after thoroughly scanning World Health Organization (WHO), American Surgical Association (ASA), Association of Academic Surgery (AAS), American College of Surgeons (ACS), American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Society of University Surgeons (SUS), and the Consortium Pain Task Force, we couldn't find any data either directly or indirectly related to our topic.
We then looked through medical research databases to find any evidence that OB/GYN surgeons' pain management is affected by patient caregivers in any way. Information found here was mostly related to pre-OB/GYN appointment suggestions and general opinions on how to avoid pain related to OB/GYN surgery.
We also tried to collect general opinions of OB/GYN surgeons on whether patient caregivers' opinions or communication changes/modifies their pain management strategies, searching through surgery-oriented forums. However, there were no relevant threads that provided any insights into patient caregivers and their effect on OB/GYN surgeons' pain management strategies and methods.
Since the data required for our purpose was qualitative and research-based in nature, we couldn't utilize triangulation or extrapolation approaches. Nor could we identify any paywalled research or studies on patients' caregivers and their effect on OB/GYN surgeons' pain mitigation procedures. Also, due to the data being related to medical science, using arbitrary approximate approaches like combined analyses and logical inference would require some definite amount of background data on the subject, which was not found during our research.
Lastly, we expanded the scope of applicable research to sources older than two years and relating to the entirety of North America, rather than just the US. However, even this failed to produce any relevant sources that provided us information on patient caregivers and their impact on OB/GYN surgeons' pain mitigation strategies. We only found a few sources that provided guidelines for surgeons on informing the patient caregivers about pain mitigation strategies.