Chapter 10: Pain Medicine 2026
Introduction
This chapter presents the latest iteration of the Pain Medicine of the Raising the Standards: RCoA Quality Improvement Compendium. The Quality Improvement Compendium provides a manual of quality improvement (QI) and audit tools for anaesthetists.
This chapter was first published in May 2026 and is due for review by November 2030.
This chapter aims to:
- Provide comprehensive recipes for QI and audit in vascular anaesthesia
- Provide practical examples based on QI methodology
- Align with RCoA’s Guidelines for the Provision of Anaesthesia Services in Inpatient Pain Management 2025 and the Faculty of Pain Medicine Core standards and associated ACSA standards to deliver safe and effective vascular anaesthesia services to patients.
We encourage clinicians to consider the domains of quality: safe, effective, personal, timely, efficient and equitable care, and to choose a balance of audits for assessing the quality of care using structure, process and outcome measures. These audits should sit within a departmental programme or personal portfolio that reflects all the different components of patient care and stimulates improvement work when standards are not met.
Anaesthetists should use the methods in this chapter and the basic template to create their own topics or adapt topics to the particular needs of their local department and the patient groups that it serves.
Use the menu on the left-hand side of this page to navigate to the individual QI and audit recipes that comprise this chapter.
For further information on this chapter, please contact: [email protected]