Assessment of quality of care in acute postoperative pain management

Background/Aim. Managing of acute postoperative pain should be of great interest for all hospital institutions, as one of the key components of patients satisfaction, which indicates quality, as well as the outcome of treatment. The aim of this study was to assess the quality of nursing care in managing acute postoperative pain and to establish factors which influence patients assessment of the same. Method. The investigation was conducted on the sample of 135 patients hospitalized in surgical clinics of the Clinical Centre of Vojvodina in Novi Sad in the form of cross-sectional study, by interviewing patients during the second postoperative day and collecting sociodemographic variables, type of surgical procedure and applied analgesic therapy which were taken from their medical documentation. The modified questionnaire of the Strategic and Clinical Quality Indicators in Postoperative Pain Management (SCQIPP) was used as the instrument of the investigation. The data were processed with suitable mathematical statistics methods such as multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVA), discriminative and other parametric procedures' and methods. Roy's test, Pearson's coefficient contingency (x), multiple correlation coefficient (R) were conducted amongst other univariant procedures. Results. The mean score for the individual items of SCQIPP questionnaire was between 2.0 and 4.7 (scale range 1-5) and the percentage of patients answers strongly agree ranged from 4.4 to 77%. The smallest number of positive answers were