Persistent Pain and Mental Health: Improving care and wellbeing

The HIN is one of four national test sites selected by the Q Improvement Lab (part of the Health Foundation) to test small scale improvement work to explore how care can be designed to meet the health and wellbeing needs of people living with both mental health problems and persistent back and neck pain. Our partners for this work are:

• St Georges hospital and Kingston hospital Chronic Pain Services teams, to develop a bespoke education and support package for out-patient physiotherapists to increase awareness of the relationship between mental health and persistent pain, increase confidence in starting conversations relating to psychological wellbeing and establishing a mentoring and support structure for complex cases.
• Sydenham Gardens Rehabilitation and Recovery Centre, to train staff and volunteers in our evidence based Joint Pain Advice approach to enable them to better support co-workers participating in their programmes who experience persistent pain.

Read our blog for more information or contact Amy Semple, Project Lead a.semple@nhs.net.