Virtual Reality therapy for pain management at the Emergency Department

Prescriptions of analgesics, especially opioids, have doubled in the Emergency department (ED) over the past decades in response to frequently reported undertreatment of pain in ED patients. Consequently, there is a shift towards a more restrained utilisation of opioids at the ED. However, there are still few (non-)pharmacological alternatives. Virtual Reality (VR) therapy is a relatively new and promising technique in non-pharmacologic pain reduction and anxiolysis and shows positive results on pain relief and pain We hypothesize that VR is effective for reducing pain scores and analgesics use at the ED. Objective of this study was to investigate the effect of VR on patient-reported pain outcomes in the ED. Secondary objectives were to investigate the effect of VR on analgesics use, patient-reported outcomes, and process indicators and to identify barriers to implementation. Unfortunately this study was terminated prematurely due to low accrual rate. This collection include the study protocol, the database and codebook with primary outcome (NRS pain scores at rest, repeated) abd secondary outcomes (NRS anxiety, analgesics use, patient reported outcomes such as acceptability of pain, process indicators such as duration of ED visit), and aggregrated results of the interviews.