PainRelief.com Interview with:
Cristina Wood, MD
Obstetric and Fetal Anesthesiologist
Children’s Hospital Colorado

PainRelief.com:  What is the background for this study?  What are the main findings?

Response: ​We all know that opiate abuse is a national crisis, but also is one of the top causes of maternal mortality in the state of Colorado. At the Colorado Fetal Care Center at Children’s Hospital Colorado, we wanted to see what we could do to reduce the need for opiate medications after cesarean delivery. We started by using wound soakers to reduce the opiate requirement and demonstrated an almost 30% reduction in postoperative opiate use. Then, when the Society of Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology (SOAP) published guidelines for Early Recovery

After Cesarean (ERAC), we incorporated these into our practice to determine if these interventions would decrease the opiate requirements further. We were so pleased to see that we could further reduce the opiate need for our moms postoperatively. In fact, we reduced it by approximately 80%, with 1/3 of our patients never taking a single narcotic medication after cesarean delivery.