JCAHO: meeting the standards for pain management.

Chronic, unrelieved pain costs approximately $100 billion per year. The impact of unrelieved pain has yet to be determined. Postoperatively, an individual has a 50-80% chance of having unrelieved moderately severe to severe pain sometime during the surgical period. In spite of knowing how to manage pain, we still have a long way to go. New and updated guidelines will assist in providing a basis for standardization in the future. This article focuses on the newly adopted JCAHO guidelines on pain management and their impact on the management of pain in the operative period.