Funding Boost for Back Pain Management

19 April 2007

A BU-led project to improve the management of back pain in Primary Care has attracted major funding worth £456,000.

The money from the Health Foundation will support the work of Dr Eloise Carr and Dr Charles Campion-Smith from the University’s Institute of Health and Community Studies.

They are joined on the project by Professor Alan Breen of the Bournemouth-based Anglo-European College of Chiropractic and Peter Wilcock, Director of the South Wiltshire Health and Social Care Academy.

The team will utilise the Foundation’s funding stream ‘Engaging clinicians in quality improvement’ to work with 10 primary care practices in Bournemouth, Poole and South Wiltshire to improve the management of acute low back pain.

The management of back pain in primary care has proved challenging in the past due to time pressures, limited local resources, lengthy waiting times for investigations, poorly integrated services, lack of knowledge (and confidence) and poor assessment of psycho-social factors known to affect the trajectory of back pain.

This new work will build on a series of small projects conducted over the past five years involving health care professionals in the management of back pain.

“Our innovative work has identified that despite good guidelines for practice the management of pain continues to be problematic as many professionals lack the knowledge and confidence to manage back pain,” says Dr Eloise Car, Reader in Pain Management Research & Education.

“Even when colleagues have sound knowledge they are frequently unable to change the environment in which care takes place.

"This project will give them skills to identify the real needs of patients and identify areas for improvement.

"The project also builds on our leading edge work over the past ten years strengthening interprofessional work based approaches to learning and improvement that demonstrably improve practice in both primary and acute care settings.”

Each practice will form a team of clinical and administrative staff - GP, nurse, physiotherapist and receptionist and patients.

These Practice teams will attend a series of eight workshops around the management of back pain and ‘healthcare improvement’ knowledge and skills and will be supported between workshops to identify aspects of care that need to be redesigned to meet their patients’ needs better.

A Steering group with senior membership from the Primary Care Trusts, local clinicians and patient representatives will be instrumental in guiding the progress of the project.

An ambitious evaluation will measure patient outcomes, for each of the practices, before and after the workshops, focussing on improved patient outcomes, improved practices to achieve these outcomes and changes in professional knowledge about treating back pain and how to design better healthcare processes.