SPHERE Health Innovation Fellow to improve opioid prescribing after orthopaedic surgery
A project to improve opioid prescribing after orthopaedic surgery has been awarded funding through SPHERE’s new Health Innovation Fellowship program.
Dr Deanne Jenkin is one of four successful recipients of the Fellowship, which supports early- to mid-career researchers to lead projects addressing major health system challenges.
Dr Jenkin, a scientist and Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Clinical Medicine at UNSW Sydney and Senior Research Fellow for the St George and Sutherland Centre for Clinical Orthopaedic Research, will lead the project Implementing a Standardised Opioid-Sparing Discharge Pathway to Optimise Prescribing After Orthopaedic Surgery.
The project aims to improve recovery after orthopaedic surgery by promoting evidence-based multimodal pain management, reducing low-value opioid prescribing, and supporting a safer transition from hospital to home while ensuring patients continue to receive safe and effective pain management.
Opioids are commonly prescribed after surgery to help manage pain. However, inappropriate or excessive prescribing can increase the risk of ongoing opioid use and opioid-related harm. While clinical guidelines recommend careful opioid use, prescribing practices after orthopaedic surgery can vary between clinicians and hospitals, particularly at discharge.
For patients, this can mean leaving hospital with more opioids than they need, without clear guidance on how long to take them or when to stop, or what other pain management strategies can support their recovery at home. For health services, it creates avoidable variation in care and a missed opportunity to support safer recovery.
Dr Jenkin said the Fellowship would provide an opportunity to work across disciplines and health services to help close the gap between evidence and everyday clinical practice.
“I am honoured to receive a SPHERE Fellowship. As a researcher working closely with clinicians and patients, I see the challenges of translating evidence into everyday practice. The Fellowship provides an exciting opportunity to build collaborations across disciplines and health services, helping ensure research leads to meaningful improvements in patient care and safer transitions from hospital to home after surgery,” Dr Jenkin said.
The project will implement a structured opioid-sparing discharge pathway across orthopaedic services at St George Hospital, Sutherland Hospital and Liverpool Hospital. The pathway will support clinicians to prioritise non-opioid first-line therapies, use opioids more judiciously, and provide clearer guidance on opioid selection, dose, duration and cessation.
The pathway will include patient education and discharge resources to support safe medication use after discharge, as well as audit and feedback processes to help clinicians monitor prescribing patterns and sustain improvements over time.
The project builds on Dr Jenkin’s existing work as Coordinating Principal Investigator of the multicentre ROAD trial, which is testing strategies to optimise pain management after fracture surgery, and her previous trial comparing mild and strong opioids following fracture surgery. It also aligns with broader research within the team focused on opioid use across the surgical pathway, including studies evaluating different opioid medications after elective joint replacement and strategies to support opioid tapering before surgery. The fellowship will focus on improving the transition from hospital to home by developing a standardised discharge pathway that supports safer, more consistent prescribing and enables emerging research evidence to be translated more rapidly into routine practice in the future.
However, the Fellowship project is not focused on removing opioids altogether. Instead, it aims to increase evidence-based multimodal pain management, reduce unnecessary or excessive prescribing, improve consistency across sites and ensure patients receive pain management that is individualised and appropriate to their needs.
The project will be delivered in stages over two years. The first phase will involve co-design with clinicians, pharmacists and consumers to ensure the pathway is practical, acceptable and aligned with routine clinical workflows. Baseline prescribing data will also be collected to understand current practice and define outcome measures.
The pathway will then be implemented at participating sites, supported by prescribing templates, clinician education, patient resources and ongoing audit and feedback. The project will assess whether the pathway improves prescribing practices and supports recovery by increasing the use of multimodal analgesia, reducing low-value opioid prescribing at discharge and maintaining patient outcomes.
Dr Jenkin brings strong clinical research experience to the Fellowship. Working closely with orthopaedic clinicians across South Eastern Sydney Local Health District, her research focuses on improving recovery after surgery, reducing pain and reducing opioid-related harm. Her work aims to generate evidence that improves outcomes and quality of care for patients undergoing orthopaedic surgery.
The Fellowship will support collaboration across several SPHERE partners, including South Eastern Sydney Local Health District, South Western Sydney Local Health District, UNSW Sydney and the Ingham Institute for Applied Medical Research. The project will draw on established clinical trial infrastructure and existing partnerships across orthopaedic services, supporting implementation across diverse hospital settings.
By the end of the Fellowship, the project aims to deliver a tested, standardised discharge pathway that can be embedded into routine orthopaedic care and could be scaled to other surgical specialties and hospitals.
Through this Fellowship, Dr Jenkin hopes to help ensure evidence about safe and effective pain management is translated into practical, sustainable changes in care, supporting better recovery and safer transitions from hospital to home for patients followingorthopaedic surgery.