Acute pain:
Members of the pain team provide support and advice for managing pain after surgery or trauma and other short episodes of pain due to disease. The nurse specialists routinely review patients on wards on a daily weekday basis. They give advice to patients and staff and deal with problems regarding medications, epidural analgesia, patient-controlled analgesia and local anaesthetic blocks.

Chronic pain services:
We offer an initial outpatient clinic appointment where patients are assessed and examined with regards to their chronic pain and a treatment plan is made. This might include medications, interventions or injections, referral to other services such as pain management or acupuncture.

A variety of procedures are carried out including local anaesthesia blocks, epidural injections, nerve-root blocks, facet joint injections, radio-frequency denervation, neuromodulation techniques and sympathetic ganglion blocks.
Joint clinics are held with other specialities, such as a facial pain, spinal injuries and orthopaedics.

The pain service plays a major part in training and education in pain management as well as participating in clinical and basic science audit and research. 
The pain service works in close association with palliative care services and the spinal injuries unit. Patients are also sometimes referred to specialists in other local hospitals for particular treatments including neurostimulation analgesia.

Nurse-led service:
We offer advice and information to patients prior to and after their diagnostic/therapeutic nerve block procedure. We also offer in clinic a private setting to trial pain relieving machines such as TENs and TSE, and the opportunity to discuss in detail the principles of management of chronic pain in relation to the patients’ individual pain problem. A nurse-led telephone clinic is also utilised to follow-up patients after medication changes and after the blocks have been undertaken.