Safe and Sound Pain Management Program

Safe and Sound Logo

Each year, tens of thousands of people die from an opioid or medication overdose. Many of them are children.

Cook Children’s Safe and Sound Pain Management Program is dedicated to finding better ways to manage pain in children.

We know that everyone feels pain in different ways. That's why it's important to make sure there are better tools and treatments to control their pain. How? By empowering patients, families, and communities to take charge of medication safety.

We're doing this by educating them on:

Safe dosing
Safe storage
Safe disposal of medications

Together with our Opioid Stewardship Committee, we've also:

Created provider guidelines
Improved staff and family education
Integrated electronic health records
Partnered with community resources

Through these efforts, we're already making great strides. We've reduced the number of opioids prescribed to our patients by half. At the same time, we're providing safer, more effective ways to control pain for children.

Opioid Stewardship Committee Charter: Our mission is to improve patient safety, reduce the risk for potential child addiction, ingestion, misuse, overdose, and death, while promoting best practices through the safe and sound management of pain.

If a poisoning does happen, call the North Texas Poison Center at 1-800-222-1222 (add this number to your cell phone right now). Calls are answered by nurses and pharmacists and 80 percent of them are handled at home, without going to the Emergency Room. Call 9-1-1 if your child won't wake up, is having trouble breathing or is having seizures.

Poison prevention tips Visit meddropbox.org

Patient education

Opioid epidemic resources

American Academy of Pediatrics
American Medical Association
Centers for Disease Control
The Opioid Epidemic: Impact on Pediatric Patients (Sept. 2018 Grand Rounds)
The Road to Patient/Family Experience (Comfort Menu @ Minute 52 - 58 | Oct. 2018 Grand Rounds)
Neurological Perspective of Yoga Therapy for Pain Reduction (Jan. 2019 Grand Rounds)
Teen Opioid Overdoses Spike at Cook Children's (July 2021)

AAP Stats

Engage your patients in choosing nonpharmacologic and low-risk pharmacologic pain management techniques as preferred first-line treatments. Use a pediatric comfort menu to aid in the discussions. The comfort menu is available in both English and Spanish.

Comfort Menu

A complete pain care plan includes assessing and addressing psychosocial aspects of pain such as stress, distress anxiety, and depression. The following list contains programs that can assist with coping strategies, behavioral modification, or chemical dependencies.

For questions, contact Psychiatry Intake at 682-885-3917

Facility referral list

Safe and Sound Pain Management Program

Each year, tens of thousands of people die from an opioid or medication overdose. Many of them are children.

Disposal and Poison Prevention

Education

Patient education

Opioid epidemic resources

Complementary Therapies

Comfort Menu

Substance Abuse & Psychosocial Treatment