Background: Interventional pain procedures may be necessary for some cancer patients when conservative treatment fails. However, pain procedures are often delayed or cancelled for many cancer patients referred to the pain clinic.

Methods: Here, we retrospectively analyzed the reasons for such cancellations in order to identify clinically avoidable causes of delay for interventional pain procedures.

Results: We enrolled 350 cancer patients who were referred to our pain clinic for an interventional pain procedure between March 2016 and February 2018. A total of 213 (60.9%) cases were cancelled, of which 114 (53.5%) cases were potentially avoidable and 99 (46.5%) were unavoidable. The most common reasons of cancellation were patient derived factors, which accounted for 85 (39.9%) cases. Especially, patient refusal is a very common reason for cancellation, with 33 (15.5%) cases attributed to this cause. The primary avoidable causes of cancellation were a recommendation that the patient continue with their current pharmacological pain treatment, conflict with another planned treatment, and pain characteristics not suitable for an interventional pain procedure. Together, these accounted for 77.2% of all avoidable cancellations.

Conclusions: Comprehensive and accurate pain assessments prior to interventional pain procedures may result in more favorable outcomes in terms of both efficient use of medical resource and effective pain relief in cancer patients.

Key words: cancer pain, interventional pain procedure, causes of cancellations, avoidable and unavoidable causes