Graney Colin, Shibuya Naohiro, Patel Himani, Jupiter Daniel C
Scott and White Health Care System, Texas A&M Health Science Center, Temple, Texas.
Department of Surgery, Texas A&M University, College of Medicine, Central Texas Veterans Health Care System, Staff, Baylor Scott and White Health Care System, Temple, Texas.
Foot Ankle Spec. 2019 Dec;12(6):530-534. doi: 10.1177/1938640018823061. Epub 2019 Jan 10.
Ultrasound-guided popliteal blocks for postoperative pain management have grown in popularity within foot and ankle surgery. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of popliteal block in preventing postoperative emergency department visits after foot and ankle surgery. We compared rates of presentation to the emergency department for pain following foot and ankle surgery between surgeries with a popliteal block and those with local field block alone. We identified 101 charts, of which 26 presented to the emergency department for postoperative pain following popliteal block. Our results demonstrated that popliteal blocks did not perform better than local blocks, and that there is no statistically significant difference between the 2 methods of postoperative pain control in terms of rates of presentation to the emergency department for pain. Level III, All statistical analyses were carried out using the R statistical package by the primary author (NS) (R Developmental, Core Team. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing, 2012. http://www.R-project.org ).
