Pain at the Emergency Department

Bruno Minotti is an emergency physician and researcher focused on pain assessment and management in the emergency department. His work centers on patient-reported outcomes and strategies to improve the recognition and treatment of acute pain in clinical practice. He is particularly interested in bridging research and bedside care, developing practical approaches that ensure patients’ pain is systematically assessed and effectively addressed. Through his work, he aims to enhance both patient experience and clinical decision-making in acute care settings.

Outline:

Pain Assessment in the Emergency Department: In the emergency department, unidimensional pain scales such as the numerical rating scale are frequently used to assess pain. While these tools can track changes in an individual patient’s pain over time, their correlation with analgesic requirements and clinical outcomes is limited. In this presentation we will discuss the following questions: What is the information we truly gain from these scores? What is the overall meaning of pain for patients in the emergency setting? What do we really need? 

A/Prof Hughes is an emergency nurse academic whose work focuses on improving pain care for adults presenting to the emergency department. He is currently the Head of the Nursing Discipline at The University of Queensland, where his teaching and supervision focus on emergency nursing, pain assessment and management, and complex adult care. Clinically, A/Prof Hughes has extensive experience in some of Australia’s busiest emergency departments, informing a research program that addresses both individual patient outcomes and system-level processes such as workload, patient flow, and short-stay models of care. His research consistently explores how organisational factors, documentation practices, and cognitive impairment influence the quality and timeliness of pain management in emergency settings. A/Prof Hughes has co-authored key studies examining best-practice pain management interventions in the emergency department, including cluster-randomised trials of multifaceted educational and systems strategies to improve analgesic practices. He has pioneered deep learning approaches to identifying patients presenting to the emergency department in pain. More recent work has investigated population-level trends among patients presenting to the emergency department with pain and the treatment they receive. Across his scholarship, A/Prof Hughes promotes nurse-led research, the use of nurses as data collectors in real-world emergency settings, and the translation of evidence into pragmatic workflow and clinical decisionmaking changes.

Outline of Webinar

A/Prof Hughes will outline the issues in identifying patients presenting to the emergency department in pain in large retrospective datasets and how the application of deep learning can overcome some of these limitations. He will then discuss the use of this technology to identify key aspects of pain prevalence and treatment in the emergency department. Drawing on his work with larger datasets, he will identify how factors such as personal and social demographics, multimorbidity, and the emergency department environment can influence the provision, speed, and outcomes of pain care in the emergency department.

Santi Di Pietro is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Pavia and consultant in Emergency Medicine at San Matteo University Hospital (Pavia, Italy).

Dr Di Pietro set up and leads the research group RAEM (Regional anaesthesia in Emergency Medicine), which  conducts studies on the use of nerve blocks for pain management in the acute care setting.   In his presentation, he will provide an overview of regional anaesthesia applications in the acute setting, with a focus on recent advances, future perspectives and controversies.