Assessment of Pain Severity and Associated Factors of Post Operative Pain Among Adult Patients in Public Hospitals of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2021

Abstract Background: Post-operative pain management is one of the key responsibilities of health professionals. Failure to manage post-operative pain effectively will lead to increase morbidity and mortality, long hospital stay, increase health care costs, and patient dissatisfaction. Despite improved understanding of pain mechanisms, advances in pain management approach, and other focused initiatives large proportion of post-operative patient’s reports pain after surgery. Therefore the major aim of this study was to assess pain severity and associated factors among post-operative adult patients in public hospitals of Addis Ababa.Methods and materials: A facility-based cross-sectional study was conducted. A total of 414 study participants were involved. Simple random sampling was used to select study participants. The data was collected by the standard questioner and checklist. The collected data were entered, cleaned, and analyzed by SPSS version 24.0 statistical software. Bi-variable analysis was employed to select independent predictors of pain severity and multivariable regression used to measure the association between independent and dependent variables. On bi-variable analysis, those variables with a value less than 0.20 were entered on multi-variable analysis. Finally, variables with a p-value < 0.05 were declared as independent predictors of the outcome variables.Results: A total of 406 study participants have responded to the interview giving a response rate of 98%. The overall incidence of moderate to severe pain was 85.5%. Preoperative analgesia adjusted odds ratio (confidence interval), 0.236(0.065-0.863), preoperative anxiety, 5.468(1.341-22.303), general surgery 7.627(1.901-30.602), orthopedics surgery, 7.195(1.055-49.094), size of the incision, 5.086(1.352-19.135), and postoperative analgesia; non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs 5.611(2.000-15.737), and tramadol, 4.714(1.506-14.753) was independent predictors of postoperative moderate to severe pain.Conclusion: The study revealed that the overall incidence of postoperative pain was high in the study area. This reflects attention given to postoperative pain management is low. Preoperative analgesia, preoperative anxiety surgery type, incision length, and postoperative analgesia were independent predictors of postoperative pain.