Transform Pain Care for your Patient
Challenges with Pain Care
We have misunderstood pain for centuries. The old model for understanding pain focused on tissues and the idea that pain itself resided in the body. We were taught that there were “pain receptors, pain fibers, pain signals, and pain pathways.” This poorly explained many people’s pain experiences: pain lasting for years beyond tissue healing, spreading in non-anatomical patterns and without an originating injury.
This has led to chaos for the person struggling with pain.
The patient shops from clinician to clinician, hoping for an answer, with no clear path and poor communication among the providers.
New Vision for Pain Care
“What if a person living with pain got messages from primary care, from an ED nurse, or a discharge planner, that they could manage much of their pain themselves, that there were many ways to change pain and that medication was only one aspect of pain care? What if we all had the same message? Could we actually prevent chronic and persistent pain and change expectations about opioid prescribing by decreasing threat and faulty beliefs early on?” - Nora Stern, MS, PT, Director, Know About Pain .
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Know About Pain provides expert consultation and educational products to answer these questions with evidence-based, proven solutions for acute and chronic pain treatment!
When pain is well understood, medication will be just one part of a good pain care plan, and persistent/chronic pain will be prevented as clinicians help patients understand how to change pain themselves. Pain care is everyone’s job. We make your job easier with tools and resources to create consistent messaging across the care continuum.
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Meet New Certification Standards
Standards and expectations regarding pain and opioid care are changing.
The Joint Commission has issued new standards as of January 2018 regarding pain assessment, opioid care, and management across the care continuum.
Know About Pain responds to key Elements of Performance
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Know About Pain provides patient education material including posters, handouts, scripting and associated clinician training to guide pain care towards a multimodal care plan that includes both pharmacological and non-pharmacologic options.
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Decrease Cost & Risk
The individual, societal and organizational risks of insufficient pain care and excessive opioid utilization are multiple:
Increased cost of care
Nursing time and burnout
Poor outcomes related to
associated pain anxiety
Providing consistent organization-wide messaging about pain will improve opioid prescribing and pain care, decreasing cost and improving safety.
Improve burnout & time treating pain
Pain Education can improve pain related anxiety
Pain-related anxiety, also known as pain catastrophizing,
has long been shown to result in a wide range of poor outcomes including increased opioid usage, decreased post-operative function, and increased cost of care post-operatively (add citations here).
Pain education and modification of clinician language can shift fear and pain-related anxiety to improve outcomes, improving pain disability and catastrophizing.
Improvement in function, in turn, means that people are actively living their lives, thus preventing depression and social isolation, as well as limiting the deconditioning from inactivity that can lead to falls, fractures and further hospitalization.
Reduce Staff Burnout
Using pain education products, a pilot site was able to decrease time spent treating patients with pain, and nurses reported that they felt better equipped to treat pain. Biopsychosocial pain care is well-suited to the patient-centered model that inspires nurses to enter the profession and presents an opportunity to improve job satisfaction.
Know About Pain provides the following resources & tools
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Pre-Operative
Planning
Inpatient Care
Discharge
Planning
Primary & Specialty
Outpatient Services
Implementing Know About Pain's simple practice changes will
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Increase patient participation in care
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Decrease opioid prescribing
while improving patient experience
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Improve your facilities’ outcomes
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Reduce burnout & improve staff satisfaction by better equipping clinicians in treating patients with pain