AUTHOR=Cegla Thomas , Hohenstein Sven , Bollmann Andreas , Pellissier Vincent , Bencheva Veronika , Schmiedl Sven 

TITLE=Impact of the pandemic on hospital care for chronic pain patients in Germany

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Medicine

VOLUME=11

YEAR=2024

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/medicine/articles/10.3389/fmed.2024.1393855

DOI=10.3389/fmed.2024.1393855

ISSN=2296-858X

ABSTRACT=<sec id="sec1"><title>Objectives</title><p>The COVID-19 pandemic affected patients’ access to health services, including patients with severe chronic pain. Since limited data on pandemic-caused changes in pain therapy is available, we analyzed its effect on hospital-based pain treatment.</p></sec><sec id="sec2"><title>Methods</title><p>For this retrospective claims data analysis conducted in <italic>n</italic> = 37 hospitals, we included patients treated for a chronic pain-related diagnosis. Discharge rates stratified by region and pain unit size were analyzed for different time periods between January 2019 and June 2022.</p></sec><sec id="sec3"><title>Results</title><p>There was a significant decrease in day-care, inpatient interdisciplinary multimodal pain management, from a total of 5,533 hospital pre-pandemic treatments in 2019, to 3,942 in 2020 and 4,262 in 2021, with a slight increase in the first half of 2022. The extent of COVID-19-related changes differed depending on region and pain unit size.</p></sec><sec id="sec4"><title>Conclusion</title><p>The decreased number of hospital pain treatments during the pandemic implies a relevant analgesic undertreatment. During future pandemics, the ethical dimension of potentially non-sufficient pain treatment should be weighted against social, medical and hygienic restrictions influencing the hospitalization rate.</p></sec>