When your child is ready to leave the PACU, your child will be transferred to another unit where they will stay until they leave the hospital.
If you don’t know your child’s hospital room, call Patient Information at the hospital.
What to expect
Your child will come from the PACU on a portable hospital bed called a stretcher and will be transferred to a hospital bed or crib in your child’s room. Nurses will closely monitor your child after the surgery. Your child will stay in a hospital room for a few hours or longer, depending on how long your child needs to stay in the hospital. Nurses will check your child’s:
- temperature, blood pressure, pulse, and oxygen level
- pain and give pain medicine when they need it
- nausea and vomiting
- intravenous (IV) to make sure there are no problems
Managing pain after surgery
Managing your child’s pain after surgery is very important to the healthcare team. Good pain relief needs attention. For the first 24 hours, and up to 72 hours, we may need to wake your child to check their pain and to make sure the pain medicine is working.
Good pain management after surgery needs a team approach. It includes you and your child’s healthcare providers. We need your support to help your child have a speedy recovery after surgery. You can play a role in your child’s recovery by knowing what to expect and how to manage pain:
- Know what words and what behaviors your child uses to show pain.
- Let your child’s healthcare team know when the pain medicine is working or not working.
- Talk to your child’s healthcare team if you have any questions about how your child’s pain is managed at the hospital.
There are different tools called pain scales that the healthcare team uses to measure your child’s pain.
- The Face, Legs, Activity, Cry, Consolability (FLACC) scale uses a child’s behaviour to measure pain in children ages 2 months to 7 years and in children who have trouble communicating their pain.
- The
FACES Pain Scale helps children ages 4 to 9 communicate their pain to you or their nurse.
- The
Number Scale uses a scale of 0 to 10 to help children ages 8 and older to communicate their pain to you or their nurse.
There are different ways that medicine is used to manage your child’s pain after surgery. Medicines given through a vein are called intravenous (IV) medicines. Medicines taken by mouth are called oral medicines.
Some children may be prescribed pain medicine that is:
- controlled by the patient (patient-controlled analgesia)
- put into a space around the spinal cord and spinal nerves in the OR (called epidural analgesia)
Moving around after surgery
It’s important for your child to get out of bed and do activities to help them recover like walking and physiotherapy (a treatment to help you move better and manage pain).
Your child’s healthcare team will let you know when your child should start getting out of bed. Your child should be able to do activities comfortably if they take pain medicine 30 to 60 minutes before the activity. As each day passes, your child should be able to move more and be more active, walk farther, and do these activities longer with less pain medicine.
Exercises
We will teach you and your child to do exercises that will help them recover more quickly after surgery. We will ask your child to do these exercises until they go home. Please remind your child to do the exercises and let them know how well they are doing as they do the exercises. You can have your child practice the exercises at home before surgery so they know what to expect.
Talk to your child’s nurse if you have questions or concerns about the exercises. Learn more about
exercises after surgery, including deep breathing, coughing, and moving.
