Chronic Pain HIT achievements 2020-21

Professor Candy McCabe, Dr Alison Llewellyn and Charlotte Spence reflect on the achievements of the Chronic Pain HIT over the last year.

Even though the pandemic made it difficult to proceed with some of our plans and it required us to be more flexible, we were able to make significant progress as a HIT.

We formed a new Executive committee and met virtually three times in 2020/21 and the committee represents a wide range of stakeholders including the University of Bath, University of the West of England, University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust, Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire Clinical Commissioning Group (BNSSG CCG), North Bristol NHS Trust, patient and public involvement (PPI) representation and the Fishponds, Air Balloon and Beechwood (FABB) Primary Care Network.

Our HIT’s strategy for the next three years was also finalised and included important feedback from our stakeholders and committee members.

We continue to contribute to work to create an integrated community-based pain service for BNSSG. There has been some progress on this deliverable during 2020/21, but the work has been impacted by COVID, however, the following have been achieved:

• A process map describing how pain services are currently provided in BNSSG has been written
• A literature review of the evidence for community pain services has been produced

Work has begun to establish a pilot Chronic Pain in Palliative Care information hub, in collaboration with Dorothy House Hospice Care. We also met with the Remedy team and connected with the developers of the Real Talk training programme, aimed at communication skills development for health and social care staff.

We hosted a half-day virtual workshop to progress our work on the development of a Chronic Pain in Palliative Care hub. The two-hour event included presentations from the Wellspring Community Centre, Bristol, and Remedy (BNSSG CCG) to provide exemplars of specific information/support services in our region to inform the ongoing development of the pilot hub and to guide the development of future chronic pain hubs. Break-out groups helped us to define more clearly what a chronic pain hub means in our region and how this will support the need for patient information, healthcare professional information and research.

Working with the Dorothy House Brand Communications team, we designed a workplan for the development of the Chronic Pain in Palliative Care hub based on analysis of the information gained from the workshop.

We also welcomed Charlotte Spence to the HIT as our Administrator and she has been a great addition to the team.