What does the chronic pain service do?
- We are a specialist outpatient only team who help children and young people with long-standing (chronic) pain problems that is interfering with a child’s life (such as schooling, social and daily activities) and family life.
- Chronic pain is pain that has been present for longer than 3 months.
- Chronic and persistent pain can be present when there is no obvious cause or after the original reason has resolved.
- Our team includes doctors, physiotherapists, psychologists and nurses to help you/your child manage their pain better.
- We aim to support children and young people to reduce the impacts on daily life that chronic pain has.
- We guide children and young people to change their response to chronic pain to enable them to do more things they want through developing new skills and different strategies to managing chronic pain.
- We want children and young people to be able to live their best lives in spite of persistent pain.
What is Chronic Pain?
When is pain helpful?
When we injure ourselves, messages are sent by nerves to the brain. The brain processes these messages so that you feel pain. This type of pain is called acute pain and is a helpful response which stops you moving that area, allowing the injury to heal. It’s like the pain is a warning which needs attention. Once this area has healed and the pain has stopped, we usually get moving again and resume our normal activities. Acute pain tends to come on very suddenly, and there is usually a clear reason for this. Examples of things which might cause acute pain are stubbing your toe and falling off your bike.
When is pain unhelpful?
Pain that has been present for at least 3 months can be called chronic pain. For some young people there may be a clear explanation for why the pain started. However, for some young people, pain may start spontaneously, feeling like it has come out of nowhere. You might have seen different specialists or had tests and investigations that have come back as normal, but you still have pain. We believe that your pain is real and can be really tough to live with.
This pain is now no longer helpful or protective and may stop you from doing the things you want to do. Pain staying around does not mean that there is ongoing damage happening in your body. Medicines which you may have had for acute pain don’t always work very well for chronic pain.
With chronic pain we may not have a clear explanation for why the pain started or has not gone away. What we do know is that pain nerves continue to send messages to the brain, and this is why you continue to hurt.
When pain has been around for a while, more changes can happen in our nervous system. More pain nerves might join in with sending messages, and this means that you might feel that your pain is getting worse or notice that other parts of your body begin to hurt. Your ability to cope with pain might reduce, and you might start to notice more pain even when you start to do less.
How can chronic pain impact on your life?
We understand that chronic pain may affect you in lots of ways, and may make you feel different to other people. Maybe you can’t do the sports you used to do, or socialise with friends as much. Perhaps for you, attending school is the biggest difficulty, or feeling able to do the things which used to make you feel happy. Below are some other ways that chronic pain may cause you difficulties:
- Can’t play sports
- Sad
- Angry
- Snappy
- Struggle to sleep
- Nobody understands
- People treat me differently
- Gain or lose weight
- Struggle to keep up with school work
- Can’t go out with friends
- Miss a lot of school
- Lonely
Taken from ‘My Pain Tooklit; For young people living with pain’ Pete Moore, Jessica Bird & Dr Frances Cole, April 2012
We understand that chronic pain can affect a young person in lots of different ways, and this is why it is useful to work as a team, as we are each able to help support you in different ways.
Aims of the service
The aims of the chronic pain management service are:
- To help you manage and understand pain better
- To reduce the impact of pain on school and social activities
- To promote self-management strategies
- To support emotional wellbeing as it relates to the impact of pain in your life, enabling you to develop an increased sense of control
- To encourage participation in physical activity
- To champion living well in spite of pain
We are not a service that typically seeks diagnostic investigations – this should be completed by the referring team prior to referral to our service.
What will my first appointment be like?
- Before your first appointment you will be sent some questionnaires. We ask you to complete these and bring them with you on the day of your appointment.
- At your first appointment you will meet members of the whole team. You should expect there to be between 3-5 team members present at your first appointment. Everyone in the team has a different job in helping you manage your pain better. It will include the Pain Doctor; Physiotherapist; Psychologist and Specialist Pain Nurse. It may sound scary coming to talk to several people at once, but we have found this is one of the best ways to work with pain problems.
- Your first appointment will last 90 minutes. During this time we will ask lots of questions to helps us to understand your pain, the problems it causes you and how it affects your life, like school and your social life.
- The doctor and physiotherapist will want to examine you – please wear something that will enable them to do this. At the same time parents can talk through any other worries with our specialist nurse and psychologist.
- Once the team has finished the assessment we usually break for 5-10 minutes. In this time we put together a treatment plan for your individual needs and discuss this with you in the final part of the appointment.
- At the end of the appointment we will agree which members of the team you need to continue to see and how plans for follow up appointments with the whole team.
- We know from the experience of patients and young people, those who engage fully with all aspects of our service benefit the most.
We understand appt can be overwhelming and individuals may have need for Reasonable Adjustments to be made. We are happy to discuss this in advance of the appointment, some of these may need organisation in advance – please contact via our [email protected] to request a discussion with a team member in advance.
- Movement breaks during the appointment
- Play specialist
- Support from LD team
- Please bring with you anything that will make you / your child more comfortable
If you cannot attend your appointment, please contact us on the number or email below to inform us as soon as possible. This will enable us to offer the appointment to another patient. We will be happy to rearrange your appointment if given sufficient notice.
Contact the Chronic Pain team
- Chronic Pain Coordinator – [email protected]
- Chronic Pain Team – [email protected]