Rethinking Pain at the British Pain Society Annual Conference

Our session was titled Rethinking Pain: Collaborative working across the clinical, voluntary and community sector to provide person-centered pain care. Our session consisted of three talks:

1. Rationale for greater collaborative working across the clinical, voluntary and community sector – Mark Johnson (Leeds Beckett Pain Team)
2. Development & delivery of the Rethinking Pain Programme: system change to address the needs of diverse communities in Bradford District & Craven – Kerry Page (Programme Manager, Rethinking Pain) and Shahzad Jamil (Clinical Team, Rethinking Pain)
3. Evaluation of system change and the Rethinking Pain programme: Theory of Change and findings from an independent evaluation – Kate Thompson (Leeds Beckett Pain Team)

I was Chair of the session, and I had one task – to keep the session to time. I failed miserably. The speakers were exemplary, timing their talks to the nearest second, but unfortunately for me their talks were so inspiring the audience couldn’t control its enthusiasm for discussion. Why should this be?

Rethinking Pain is at the forefront of system-change in the NHS by delivering a community-centred approach to health care. Rethinking Pain is led by a voluntary and community-sector organisation, Keighly Healthy Living, breaking the mould of pain services always being led by the medical/therapy sector.

In my talk, I reasoned that the burden of chronic pain in society could be reduced by shifting our mindset ‘upstream’ using pain community support. I argued a need to focus less on treatments acting on tissue and more on supporting people and their painful experiences. I used two Public Health England reports produced by colleagues from the Centre of Health Promotion Research at Leeds Beckett to provide evidence of “… a compelling case for a shift to more person and community centred ways of working in public health and healthcare…” (Jane South et al. 2015) and that a whole systems approach is scalable for the delivery of services (Jude Stansfield et al. 2020).

I managed to formally close the session 5 minutes late, but the speakers were ‘hounded’ for another 45 mins by delegates enthusiastically wanting to find out more. In fact we would still be at the venue answering questions to this day if we hadn’t been whisked off to be interviewed for the podcast Airing Pain, hosted by the charity Pain Concern. 

For decades, members of the British Pain Society have pushed for community support for those with persistent pain. The real challenge has been designing and putting this new approach into action. The Rethinking Pain programme is the first to fully embrace community-centred healthcare for people living with pain, and we're thrilled to be their academic partners on such an exciting journey. You can find out more about Rethinking Pain in our recent article published in the journal Frontiers in Pain Research.