PCA orale

Intravenous patient controlled analgesia is used for postoperative pain management for close to thirty years. The changing concept in the management of postoperative patients including the programmes of enhanced recovery after surgery have changed the constraints of postoperative pain management. Two recent systems allow to avoid intravenous administration of opioids: sufentanil sublingual administration and the Smartbottle that makes available on demand a morphine solution. These two systems are described and analysed in the current article.