In Australia 1 in 5 people have chronic pain.
Many people like yourself may find that that pain interferes with the simple activities of daily life.
They may also find that those around them don't understand their predicament and so they feel isolated and alone.
If this is your situation then this website is very much for you.
It's come about through many discussions with people in pain and also GP's and many other health professionals.
It's really drawing together what's in the latest scientific research, it's a message of hope, it’s a message of new knowledge and new skills that can really change outcomes in chronic pain.
I'm really excited as a GP to see all the information on this website, now available to people with chronic pain.
It's designed so that you don't need to really to sit down and try and get all the information in one session.
You can come back to it anytime you please, you know, view it over a couple of days or even weeks and probably a good idea also is to get your family and friends to have a look at the website.
The more they understand about how pain works and the more they understand about managing pain in ways that you can manage your pain, they can support you with what your doing.
So I hope you find the information on the website useful and if you do have any questions don't be afraid to ask your GP, your health professional we're all there to help you.
It opens up a whole new possibilities in life for me, whereas before it was , this is sort of basically the end of my life.
But it's not now it's just the start of a new phase.
Like six months ago I would've never imagined… like… being here where I am today.
I would've never thought that it was going to get easier.
I've learnt that you know you have to kinda not lose hope so you need to, um… have faith that it's gonna become more manageable and it's gonna get a little better.
What I've learnt I'm able to control the pain and it's made so much difference to my life and what… what I can do.
I was basically a free person rather than twelve months ago being trapped in this cell of chronic pain.
You know I do have pain and I will always have pain but it's such a wonderful thing to be able to control it, and not let it control me and to be able to live your life as fully as you can and have a better quality of life by doing just simple things that we've always done.
Ian: So the Pain Management Network Website was launched in March 2014
It was created to assist patients who are suffering from chronic pain and assist doctors who are looking after those patients
The information that we have for pain management is significantly changed in the last few years
So we need to communicate that information
Not only to patients and carers and family but also to clinicians as well
The Pain Management Network consulted widely and with the collaboration of pain clinicians, both private and public, GP’s and consumers throughout New South Wales We decided to use a website featuring film, evidence based information and resources and interactive self management tools as the means for communicating a large amount of complex information to audiences including time poor clinicians and people who, due to their pain, lack the concentration to sit for long periods
Hester: The ACI Pain website covers everything you'd ever want or need to know about chronic pain
Psychological therapies, sleep, diet, exercise, all those really useful things that they can use to actually better manage their pain
So as a time poor GP, it’s great to have that back up
And it’s not just me, their trusted GP who’s talking to them
But it’s also pain specialists, it’s experts and it’s people with a lived experience of pain
Ian: What we’ve managed to achieve with this website is a tool and a way to communicate information effectively not just nationally but also internationally and has been taken up by a lot of people and a lot of professionals because it is such a simple, but very effective communication tool to educate with
One of the reasons this website has been successful is because we can be confident in the information provided
We know it’s evidence based, provided by experts and validated by consumers
The great thing about working with ACI is they help facilitate change
And great change
No longer just confined to the areas I was working in
We have experts and clinicians brought together and they collaborate now, whereas we weren’t doing that before
We are seeing changes in peoples lives
And one of the things I see is that I am now working much more closer with other clinicians and health providers to improve the care of these patients
Hester: I’ve been using the ACI pain website for sometime now and I find it’s a really good tool when seeing my patients that have chronic pain and one of the aspects of it that is fantastic is that it helps me to work with them around focusing on what's important.
So my patients come in and their complaining of pain and that’s really important, however I want to change that conversation to be more, not so much around the pain but much more around function.
So much more around how does the pain effect your life? How does the pain effect your ability to have a life of meaning? To engage in your life? To be able to do what's important for you? Medications have a small role but those lifestyle changes, that ability to manage your pain in active ways makes a huge difference to your experience of pain and therefore the quality of your life.
One of the things that we know really clearly is that if you intervene early with evolving chronic pain within that first three months even when people are still having investigations done when it’s still not clear.
If we intervene and help patients to understand their pain.
Why it's happening, what's happening, what they can do to actively manage it for themselves, we know there are better outcomes.
People maintain function better and manage their pain better.
So within the consult setting, I can show my patient the website.
Maybe if we've got some time, have a listen to some of the videos or more often than not, because I'm busy just suggest to them - "Go and have a look at this it is really worth while.
It'll give you some ideas."
There's also a tab on the homepage for people that have a spinal chord injury and pain.
So if you do have a patient that has a spinal cord injury it is really useful for them to go and have a look at this and actually really useful for us as well.
The ACI pain website has been put together in a really useful way.
It covers everything you'd ever want or need to know about chronic pain.
It approaches it from a holistic point of view.
It’s not anti pharmaceuticals.
but it actually puts the role of all the different modalities that we have to manage chronic pain in one place and puts it in a way that is really useable for both us, as health professionals and for our patients.
I have found that it's really, really useful and I would really encourage you to take the time to take a look at it and see what's going to work for you and know that it’s there so you can just Google “ACI Pain” and up it will come and you can go to the parts that you need for that particular patient.
