Winfried Meissner

Prof. Dr. Winfried Meissner
Head of Pain Unit and Palliative Care Department
Dept. of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine
Jena University Hospital

After his residency as an anesthesiologist at University Hospital Berlin-Steglitz, Winfried Meissner was appointed Head of Jena University Hospital’s Pain Unit in 1994, and Head of the Palliative Care Department in 2009. The Pain Unit covers all areas of pain management (acute pain service, outpatient service unit, inpatient consultation service, multimodal pain management program, interdisciplinary pain conference, etc.). Prof. Meissner and his group have initiated and coordinate two large registries in the area of acute pain: QUIPS (Quality Improvement in post-operative pain management; in Germany) and its international counterpart PAIN OUT (Improvement in postoperative PAIN OUTcome). These registries offer feedback and benchmarking of pain treatment outcomes and facilitate health service research which resulted in a couple of landmark publications. In addition, he was coordinator of the NeuroPAIN project (chronic pain and neurologic consequences in sepsis survivors) and has broad teaching experience, e. g. development of curricula for perioperative care, palliative care, medical communication and medical English. He is coordinator of IMIPainCare’s subproject PROMPT (setting up a registry to follow-up postsurgical pain). In 2020, he received the Robert G. Addison Award by the American Academy of Pain Medicine.

Meissner is president-elect of the German Pain Society and member of several national and international societies including ESA and IASP. He is married and has five children.

• Stamer U, Ehrler M, Lehmann T, Meissner W, Fletcher D. Pain-related functional interference in patients with chronic neuropathic postsurgical pain: An analysis of registry data. PAIN 2019 doi: 10.1097/
• Zaslansky R, Meissner W, Chapman D. Pain after orthopaedic surgery: differences in patient reported outcomes in the USA versus internationally. An observational study from the PAIN OUT dataset. BJA 2018 doi: 10.1016/j.bja.2017.11.109
• Meissner W, Komann M, Erlenwein J, Stamer U, Scherag A. The Quality of Postoperative Pain Therapy in German Hospitals. Dtsch Arztebl Int 2017;114: 161-7
• Zaslansky R, Rothaug J, Chapman CR, Bäckström R, Brill S, Fletcher D, Fodor L, Gordon DB, Komann M, Konrad C, Leykin Y, Pogatzki-Zahn E, Puig MM, Rawal N, Ullrich K, Volk T, Meissner W. PAIN OUT: the making of an international acute pain registry. Eur J Pain 2015;19:490-502
• Schwenkglenks M, Gerbershagen HJ, Taylor RS, Pogatzki-Zahn E, Komann M, Rothaug J, Volk T, Yahiaoui-Doktor M, Zaslansky R, Brill S, Ullrich K, Gordon DB, Meissner W. Correlates of satisfaction with pain treatment in the acute postoperative period: results from the international PAIN OUT registry. PAIN 2014;155:1401-11
• Gerbershagen HJ, Aduckathil S, van Wijck AJM, Peelen LM, Kalkman CJ, Meissner W. Pain Intensity on the First Day after Surgery. Anesthesiology, 2013;118: 934-44