Abstract / Summary
Effective postoperative analgesia is essential for patients recovering from abdominal surgery, as adequate pain relief plays a key role in achieving positive surgical outcomes. Most patients receive systemic opioid medications after their procedure; however, these medications can cause side-effects that make them less than ideal analgesic agents. There has been a significant movement toward using regional anaesthesia techniques to provide an alternative to using systemic opioids as part of a multimodal approach to postoperative analgesia for patients undergoing surgical procedures. One form of regional anaesthesia that has become quite popular is the use of fascial plane blocks. An example of a fascial plane block is the Posterior Quadratus Lumborum Block (PQLB), which has been shown to be very effective in providing analgesia to the abdominal wall by helping to deliver local anaesthetic agent to the thoracolumbar fascia. The purpose of this case series was to evaluate three patients who received PQLB performed under ultrasound guidance following general anaesthesia for postoperative analgesia. The primary variables that were evaluated included postoperative pain scores, time to the first dose of an analgesia, amount of opioids consumed, and haemodynamic stability throughout the course of each patient’s procedure. Results of this study demonstrated that patients receiving ultrasound-guided PQLB had adequate postoperative analgesia, as evidenced by low pain scores, delayed requiring supplemental analgesics, and relatively low opioid consumption. This case series demonstrated that ultrasound-guided PQLBs may be an effective option for use as part of multimodal analgesia techniques as an adjunct therapy to improve postoperative pain control and comfort for patients undergoing abdominal surgery, as well as improve the surgical recovery process for these same patients between surgical procedures.