EPM Essential Pain Management

The EPM Application is a pain management tool developed as a pocket guide for health care workers who have attended the EPM Workshop and use EPM’s principles in their day to day practice. It’s ease of use however, will help any healthcare work to assess and manage pain in a variety of settings.

Essential Pain Management (EPM) is a cost-effective, multi-disciplinary program run by the Faculty of Pain Medicine of the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists (ANZCA). EPM’s workshop helps healthcare workers and students to improve pain knowledge, implement a simple framework for managing pain and address pain management barriers.
EPM is taught now in over 40 countries and is practised widely.

The basis of the EPM Application is the Recognise-Assess-Treat (R-A-T) formula to guide pain management. It uses pain assessment scoring systems and suggests non-drug as well as drug treatments based on the workshop. The Application includes a copy of EPM’s Manual and a basic Formulary with limited information on commonly used analgesics and adjuvants.

The QuickTreat button opens some recognisable pain diagnoses and suggests non-drug and drug treatment options for these without the need to follow the R-A-T.

The Application also includes a Logbook (My Patients) to help keep a rolling record of multiple patient details which can be shared amongst health workers. The use of patient identifiers is at the discretion of the healthcare worker and EPM encourages the user to follow local guidelines strictly. It is possible to apply the R-A-T to a real patient situation without recording any data.

The Application’s usefulness is very dependent on the thoughts and views of the users. Please use the “Contact Us” section to send the developers feedback. This will greatly assist future modifications and updates.