Experiences, perceptions and attitudes of health and social care professionals to management of children’s chronic non-cancer pain –a qualitative evidence synthesis

We are delighted to announce that we are beginning a new review focused on the experiences of health and social care professionals of the management of children’s chronic non-cancer pain. This review builds on previous work that was published in the NIHR Journals Library and the Cochrane Library by the CHAMPION group, led by Professor Emma France from the University of Stirling.

Why are we doing this review?

Globally, chronic pain (which lasts 12 or more weeks) in childhood is widespread, affecting around 20% to 35% of children and young people and has a big, negative impact on the quality of life of children and their families. The NHS spends around four billion pounds a year treating just adolescent pain (British Pain Society, 2018). Despite this, in the UK, there are few specialised chronic non-cancer pain services for children. There are large gaps in knowledge about the best treatments, and insufficient training of health and social care professionals in children’s chronic non-cancer pain management. An urgent need therefore exists for research to increase our understanding of how health and social care professionals assess and treat children with chronic pain, so services and outcomes for patients can be improved.

What are we going to do?

Our review is a qualitative evidence synthesis. This is a method of bringing together findings from multiple studies containing qualitative data. For this study, this will include research studies that have captured data in the form of words (rather than numbers) describing staff experiences, perceptions and attitudes. We will find these research studies by searching a range of online databases. We then combine this information and conduct new analyses to increase our understanding of how health and social care staff assess and treat children with chronic non- cancer pain. We are focusing on non-cancer pain because pain associated with cancer has specialist NHS services. In our future blogs, we will provide more details on the techniques we use to achieve our review. Look out for another post later this year!

If you would like to know more, you can find a copy of our review protocol here.

Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement

Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement is really important to our NESSIE work, and we are currently looking for people who might be interested in getting involved in this review. We are seeking:

People over 18 years of age who experienced chronic non-cancer pain as a child

Parents or carers of children/young person experiencing chronic non-cancer pain

Health or social care professionals who provide services for children with chronic non-cancer pain

People who work for a charity or other organisation that provides help for children with chronic, non-cancer pain and their families

Please contact NESSIE@ed.ac.uk if you would like more information on how you can get involved.

We will use this blog site to keep you updated on the progress of the review so why not subscribe to our blog by leaving your details on the right-hand side of the page?

Blog by Dr Katie Thomson

References:

The British Pain Society. Media Resources: FAQs. London: The British Pain Society; 2018. URL: https://www.britishpainsociety.org/media-resources/ (Accessed 7 March, 2024).