Jack Pye

We use Gabapentin, prior to visits, We now have the palatable liquid that is chicken flavour also which is tolerated well but have had good effects. The practice will routinely use it if a patient is coming in for an operation or procedure pre emptively. We use trazodone in the hospital too and this had good effects for stressed patients but some that are already worked up this sometimes doesn’t touch the sides. Very interesting about the use of trazadone in cats and I wonder whether for instance Cats with urinary catheter placement would benefit from such medications as these seem to be our typically most stressed patients in the hospital despite adequate analgesisa on pain scoring etc.

We do use them, probably not as much as we possibly could so room for improvement, we’ve got laminated pain score sheets to record them on, I find the biggest challenge is if I haven’t managed to have a full handover from the staff member carrying out the pain score before I do, everyone interprets things differently and some patients react completely differently to different members of staff. It is something that I find very valuable working my nights as I carry out several on the same patient for instance and can see the effects when altering analgesia in that patient. We tend to use the Glasgow pain score for cats and dogs and find this to work fairly well. Definitely has me thinking that we could use these for many more/if not all of our inpatients!
Jack