title: JCAHO: meeting the standards for pain management.
abstract: Chronic, unrelieved pain costs approximately $100 billion per year. The impact of unrelieved pain has yet to be determined. Postoperatively, an individual has a 50-80% chance of having unrelieved moderately severe to severe pain sometime during the surgical period. In spite of knowing how to manage pain, we still have a long way to go. New and updated guidelines will assist in providing a basis for standardization in the future. This article focuses on the newly adopted JCAHO guidelines on pain management and their impact on the management of pain in the operative period.
authors.forename: C P
authors.initials: CP
authors.lastname: Curtiss
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007591:Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations; D010149:Postoperative Pain / Q000451:nursing / Q000628:therapy*; D010353:Patient Education as Topic; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D014481:United States