Most of the patients, who underwent surgery, experience the postoperative pain. However, less than a half of patients get adequate relief from this pain. Therefore, an efficient postoperative pain control management is required for the care of the surgical patients. Many of postoperative interventions and strategies are there to tackle this problem, but their efficacy is still uncertain.

Therefore, a survey called ASSIST (Patient Satisfaction Survey: Pain Management) was conducted to assess patient's satisfaction between different modalities of pain management at different time after the surgery. In this survey, patient's level of pain at rest and ambulation was also evaluated. The study was executed among 1046 postoperative patients from India. To assess patient satisfaction, pain scores, and overall pain management, a questionnaire was specially designed at three different time points. Further, for evaluation of statistical significance between different modalities of pain management, one-way ANOVA test was used. The pain levels at rest and ambulation were measured on the scale of 1-10. The effectiveness of acute pain services (APSs) was also assessed during the survey. For this, patients were divided into two groups, one APS, and another non-APS group. The group's effectiveness was evaluated by a paired t-test.

After the analysis of the results, it was found that about 88.4% of patients were expressed postoperative pain during the first 24 h after the surgery. These patients have 2.3 ± 1.8 mean pain score at rest during the first 24 h after the surgery. This pain score was reduced to 1.1 ± 1.5 at 72 h. Further, the score of overall patient's satisfaction was 7.9 out of 10. The paired t-test showed that non-APS group had a higher percentage of pain relief as compared to APS group (p < 0.0016).

Hence, the overall survey from the Indian subcontinent demonstrated that current standards of care in postoperative pain management remain substandard. On the other hand, the APS services are not up to the mark for pain management.