Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

Pain is common, disabling, and costly. Physiotherapists plan an important role in delivering activity-based, non-pharmacological treatment. There have been dramatic advances in pain research in recent years that can help healthcare providers to deliver more effective care for people with pain. Many health care providers, including physiotherapists, have yet to integrate new pain research into clinical practice. This research to practice gap may be partly influenced by the inconsistent and inadequate pain education for healthcare providers across Canadian university programs. Internationally endorsed "Core Competencies for Pain Management" provide a valuable guide for pain education in health professional training. Despite the support for implementing the core competencies, there is no research investigating whether their implementation in physiotherapy curriculum improves pain-related learning outcomes for students. This planning grant will support a series of activities (a review, a consensus process, and a workshop) that will help the researchers develop methods for measuring the outcomes of pain education with input from important stakeholders in physiotherapy pain education. Participants in the planning activities will include representatives of the following groups: people living with pain, physiotherapy students, practicing physiotherapists, pain educators, physiotherapy regulators, and program administrators. The methods determined by these planning activities will be used in a future study investigating the relationship between alignment of education with core competencies in pain management and education outcomes. The results of the future study have the potential to improve physiotherapy pain education and ultimately improved care for people living with pain.