Editorial: Acute Pain Service an Open and Challenging Issue

Commonly the term ‘Acute Pain Service’ (APS) is referred to an in-house healthcare-team organization dedicated to the management of acute POP in surgical patients. Ideally such organization goals are to apply, monitor, adjust, study and ameliorate congruent periopera- tive analgesia treatments in order to optimize perioperative outcomes. While the original idea and corner stone of the traditional APS was a multidisciplinary collaboration to successfully interface between the patient and other healthcare professionals engaged in the postoperative care, often it was the anesthesiologist, by virtue of his/her specific knowledge of pain pathophysiology and expertise in the management of acute pain, who pursued the implementation and coordination of the APS. Over the years recommendations to improve the quality of POP management have specified that efforts must move beyond assessment and communication of pain to imple- mentation and evaluation of improvements in pain treatment that are timely, safe, evidence based, and multimodal. Indeed, evidence from the literature has shown that suitable POP control requires both the application of an appropriate analgesia methods along with continuous supervision and adjustment of its therapeutic effects.