How did you get started in pain management?
After being involved in anesthesiology residential program education, I learned that pain management should be the main concern for health services. Inadequate management of acute, chronic, and cancer pain will cause suffering and harmful consequences to the patient.
I became concerned about acute pain services as well as chronic pain clinics. I was able to perform some interventional procedures as a part of multimodal approach in pain treatment as part of the pain service I work for. In addition, I have been actively educating medical students and residential doctors on the topic of pain and how to treat it. The importance of pain education is a main concern of my activity in field of pain because more education will increaset impact and lead to better pain practice, especially in Indonesia.
It has been more than 10 years since the Acute Pain Service has been developed in my hospital and it has provided optimal post-surgical pain services and become a learning place for many pain practitioners in Indonesia. Now, we are trying to be more focused on multidisciplinary pain team collaboration for a more holistic approach to patient in pain especially for chronic and cancer pain.
Do you have any advice to others?
Do some research on acute pain management such as post surgical pain modalities and look at the evidence of many pharmacological treatment choices for different acute pain conditions. I believe this will be an important issue for future research.
Why did you become an IASP member and why have you stayed a member?
I orginially became a member of IASP as a prerequisite for participating in one of the training programs that was supported by IASP– the Clinical Training of Multidisciplinary Pain Management in Bangkok in 2008. This experience opened my mind about the field of pain management. IASP has many programs in pain management development in many parts of the world, and the IASP website is rich with high quality information, especially the Pain journal. The journal has a variety of topics and research and has become the main source of my knowledge in understanding pain and its treatment for me as an educator and practitioner.
What’s next for you in terms of collaboration in the pain field?
While challenging, the most important thing for me to do will be to work together with other colleagues in my national pain organization, IPS (Indonesian Pain Society as a chapter of IASP) and the regional organization, ASEAPS (Association of South East Asia Pain Societies, a Federation of IASP). This will be a big opportunity for me to take part in developing pain management programs in the regional ASEAN countries.
What do you like to do outside of work?
Apart from being with family in spare time, the main thing I do in my free time is try to create educational media content that can be useful in the field of pain. Becoming a “social influencer” for health practitioners and community members in the field of pain is one of the big hopes that I want to achieve.