Ketamine for sedation in acutely painful procedures in Kenya

Adequate pain management for painful procedures improves the quality and safety of patient care and has become accepted as a basic human right. However, in low-resource settings pain relief for painful procedures is scarce for many reasons, including a lack of anaesthetists. Forcibly holding patients down during painful procedures remains common practice in Kenya and in other low-resource settings.

This paper describes how non-anaesthetists who were trained in the ESM-Ketamine programme broadened use of their skills to provide procedural sedation for patients in need of painful procedures when an anaesthetist would not have been previously called. Given the effectiveness of the programme, the authors suggest that scale-up of the ESM-Ketamine package may support the human rights imperative that every person deserves pain relief when undergoing a painful procedure.