Grant: Project Grant

Worldwide, chronic pain affects around 1 in 5 adults and children; yet patients are often managed with interventions that are ineffective, or even harmful. Many clinical practice guidelines have been developed to inform management options for patients, but they vary widely in terms of quality and often provide conflicting recommendations. This has led to confusion among doctors, patients, and health policymakers. Thus, there is an urgent need to consolidate existing guideline recommendations, evaluate their credibility, and distinguish those recommendations that are trustworthy from those that are not. Our goal is to co-develop and co-mobilize an open-access digital platform that identifies all guideline recommendations in three high priority areas identified by diverse stakeholder groups including patient partners: (1) opioids for chronic pain, (2) medical cannabis for chronic pain, and (3) interventional procedures for chronic spine-related pain, in adults and children. This platform will: (1) organize and group recommendations from all available guidelines published in the last five years on the areas of interest, (2) summarize their recommendations, (3) evaluate the credibility of recommendations to distinguish those that are trustworthy from those that are not, (4) for trustworthy recommendations, we will report benefits and harms of management options and other contextual factors such as patient values and preferences, cost and feasibility concerns, (5) identify gaps in available guidance, (6) provide plain language recommendations to facilitate shared decision-making between people living with chronic pain and their healthcare providers, and (7) provide a platform so other parties can contextualize (adopt or adapt) the available recommendations to their particular context and settings.