Surgeons Can Decrease the Pain of WALANT Local Anesthesia Injection if They Ask for Patient Feedback

Abstract

Introduction: Some patients who are having WALANT (Wide Awake Local Anesthesia No Tourniquet) carpal tunnel surgery are afraid of the pain of local anesthesia injection. Many surgeons do not yet focus on minimally painful injection techniques to avoid unnecessary painful patient experiences. This study measured the number of local anesthetic injection pain events in feedback from patients to the injecting surgeon to decrease the pain of his injections. Methods: A single surgeon asked 250 consecutive carpal tunnel surgery patients to tell him each time they felt a pain event during his local anesthetic injection process for WALANT carpal tunnel surgery. The pain events were counted and provided an objective pain number to score the surgeon’s injection skill over the 35 months of the study. Results: The surgeon's injection pain score improved dramatically over the time of the study. In his last 50 patients, he scored a hole-in-one 37 times, where none of his first 50 patients gave him such a high score. A hole-in-one happens when the only pain the patient feels is the small sting of the first 27 gauge needle insertion. Conclusions: Surgeons who inject local anesthesia for carpal tunnel surgery can ask patients to tell them each time they feel a pain event after the sting of the first needle insertion is numbed. Counting the number of pain events provides a score for each injection process. This score from immediate patient feedback can help the surgeons decrease the pain of their injections.