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To compare pain management methods after thoracotomy in congenital cardiac surgery, while promote the usage of pain scales in everyday practice Patients undergoing congenital cardiac surgery with thoracotomy were enrolled in our ongoing study. Two groups were created, the first who received continuous infiltrative intercostal local analgesia through a cannula placed in the surgical wound, while the second received continuous erector spinae plane block infiltration through a cannula inserted postoperatively. Their pain was assessed using a variety of pain scales adjusted to their age. The efficacy of the different methods was measured via the necessity of additional pain relief medication, postoperative dyspnea and the presence of atelectasis. 29 patients have been enrolled so far, 10 of them received ESP block and the remaining patients had intercostal cannulae inserted. According to early results compared against the control group of previous cases, all the examined patients required less or no opioid pain medication, and low numbers of postoperative dyspnea and atelectasis were observed. Hardship was experienced in regard to the application of different pain scales, which required further adjustment during the study. Post-thoracotomy pain management is crucial for early rehabilitation. Proper pain relief not only elevates patients' quality of life but it also decreases the number of days spent in high-cost intensive care, thus shortening the hospital stay. Even though the study has not yet concluded it can be confidently said that both types of regional analgesia introduced are useful compared to our control group. It is more challenging for anaesthesiologists to introduce ESP block in younger patients, but if inserted correctly in both infants and older children its efficacy might surpass local surgically inserted cannulas. On the other hand, the time and experience required to surgically introduce the above-mentioned device is much less. The selected pain scales could be helpful, but especially in infants it is often hard to objectively quantify the severity of postoperative pain. To effectively use these pain scales the observers must have a great amount of experience in treating critically ill infants and children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]