One year's experience with an acute pain service in a Spanish University Clinic hospital.

We describe the experience of the acute pain service of the University Hospital of Galicia, Spain since its inception. We have treated 1214 patients using either patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) with morphine (72%), or patient-controlled epidural analgesia with fentanyl + bupivacaine (22%). Three hundred and five patients had minor complications, mainly pruritus (35%) in patients with patient-controlled epidural analgesia. Three (0.33%) patients using PCA had respiratory depression treated with naloxone; no patient with patient-controlled epidural analgesia had respiratory depression. In our experience the creation of an acute pain service and the associated development of pain-treatment protocols and the training of hospital personnel produced excellent results.