Background: Acute postoperative pain in developing countries is inadequately managed and treated due to their lack of resources in terms of trained health professionals, drug availability, and basic equipment. Given potential consequences of under-assessment and under-treatment of acute postoperative pain, this issue needs to be addressed in Vietnam. Despite this, there exist a limited number of studies investigating this problem in Vietnam. Objectives: This study aims to estimate the prevalence of acute pain in adult patients aged 618 years old at twenty four hours following surgery at General Surgery Department of Binh Dan Hospital and to explore relevant factors of pain, including socio-demographic characteristics, types of operation, and concerns before surgery, and chronic disease comorbidity. Method: This study was conducted as a cross-sectional analytic study with convenience sampling method. 511 adult patients who underwent abdominal surgery at the General Surgery Department of Binh Dan Hospital during March 2015 participated in this study. Numeric Rating Scale (NRS) pain score was used to evaluate acute post-operative pain among patients. Approximately 10 minutes face to face interviews using a structured questionnaire including 4 main parts: socio-demographic characteristics variables, medical history, the acute postoperative pain, concerns before undergoing surgery was conducted. Main results: 99.2% patients (total percent of mild to severe categories) reported that they had to experience the worst pain after surgery. Furthermore, patients with severe pain made up over 63%. The average hours that a patient had to experience the worst pain was 3.4 (3.8). Acute postoperative pain was significantly associated with gender, place of residence, surgical techniques, surgical area, surgical concerns and quality of life of patients (p<0.05). Conclusions: Acute post-operative pain was salient among patients undergoing abdominal surgery at the Binh Dan hospital. This issue needs to be taken into consideration and addressed to help patients immediately because of adverse impacts on patients’ life. In addition, identification of predictive factors is critical to facilitate early intervention and better pain management for patients.
