Chronic Pain HIT

The Chronic Pain Health Integration Team (HIT) brings together clinicians, academics, patients and carers to focus on improving the lives of those with chronic pain.

The challenge

Chronic pain is pain that lasts more than three months. It affects between one third and one half of the UK population.

Chronic pain:

leads to 4.6 million GP visits per year
significantly affect’s people’s quality of life
significant impacts the economy, due to the demand on healthcare and people being unable to work

The most common chronic pain conditions include: non-specific low back pain, regional joint pain, neuropathic pain and widespread musculoskeletal pain/fibromyalgia.

People with chronic pain often don’t respond well to current treatments and may be very disabled as a result of the pain they live with. The care they receive is mainly focused on self-management of persistent pain.

The challenge is to support those who live with chronic pain and those who provide chronic pain services or care.

What we want to achieve

The Chronic Pain Health Integration Team wants everyone living with chronic pain in our region to be able to access the support they need.

We help people living with chronic pain in our region:

have equal access to the most up-to-date information that is backed up by evidence
get support from appropriately trained people in health and social care
take part in research studies that further build the evidence base around chronic pain.

We also want to make people outside of our HIT (including commissioners and policy makers) aware of the impacts of chronic pain on people, society and the economy, and how the HIT can help.

Read our Chronic Pain HIT Strategy 2020-2023. This strategy was developed with input from:

people who represent health and social care services and commissioning relevant to chronic pain across the Bristol and Bath region,
people with a wide range of chronic pain conditions, and their carers.

Getting involved

The Chronic Pain HIT is keen to hear from anyone with an interest in chronic pain. Our membership represents a broad range of healthcare providers, professions and service users.

Please get in touch if you want to know more about our work or are interested in joining our HIT.