Phoenix hospital opens pediatric pain suite

Phoenix Children’s Hospital recently announced the opening of its new Interventional Pain Procedural Suite, a groundbreaking model of care. The suite is located at the Phoenix Children’s Thomas Campus, and is the first of its kind in pediatric medicine in the Western United States.

The suite is a space where professionals can execute advanced, image-guided pain procedures for children without needing to send them to the operating room. For many patients, these procedures did not require general anesthesia, yet they would still have to wait weeks to obtain care. This is designed to deliver faster, more targeted relief for children experiencing acute and chronic pain.

Dr. Sean Gamble, Pediatric Anesthesiologist at Phoenix Children’s, joined “Arizona Horizon” to discuss more about the new suite.

“Unfortunately, chronic pain affects one in five kids around the country right now, every day,” Dr. Gamble said, “…anything from chronic migraines to abdominal pain, post-surgical pain, some genetic condition…it’s really a rampant problem.”

Dr. Gamble emphasized how it is frequently misunderstood, as many individuals assume it is related to anxiety.

“We know that it’s more than that, it’s a true biological disease, with a biological process,” Dr. Gamble explained, “…we have great interventions, and procedures, and therapies to try and treat pain…we try to correct those miscommunications that have happened so often in the medical system.”

For some time, Dr. Gamble had incorporated interventional pain early on in treatments and therapies as part of a multiple-disciplinary strategy. However, as some of these children need anesthesia for their procedures, this meant they had to wait for quite some time before receiving proper treatment.

“…now that we have the procedure suite, we have this dedicated room that we can take kids, do minimally invasive non-surgical interventions, in a very short window of time,” Dr. Gamble said, “…we’ve turned it around from…eight to ten weeks of wait time, down to eight to ten days in some cases.”