Grant: Operating Grant - HIV/AIDS CBR Program - General

Chronic pain affects sleep, mood, cognition, and emotional functioning while often resulting in significant suffering, disability, and reduced quality of life. Additional burdens of living with chronic pain for people living with HIV (PHAs) include physical and psychological pain, added HIV-related stigma, diminished workplace and social engagement, and financial costs. The International Association for the Study of Pain defines chronic pain as "An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage" that lasts or recurs for longer than 3 months. Prevalence of chronic pain is high and more common in PHAs with injection drug use. Frequent types of pain in PHAs are neuropathy, musculoskeletal and widespread pain. However, little is known about PHAs' use of polypharmacy, substances and complementary, alternative and/or integrative health to manage chronic pain. We will implement serial mixed-methods Community-Based Research (CBR) to: 1) form, train and sustain collaboration of 10 "peer researchers" living with HIV to work with the research team; 2) characterize the experiences, management and access to care for chronic pain amongst PHAs from their perspective and those who care for them, 3) employ a participatory and integrated knowledge mobilization framework to disseminate the findings in community and academic formats and events. Our mixed-methods design aims are (1) forming the peer researchers' team of up to 10 diverse PHAs, (2) implementing a quantitative national bilingual online survey over 9 months, administered to at least 500 random sampled Canadian PHAs who self-report living with chronic pain, (3) conducting a participatory analysis and interpretation of statistical data to inform a (4) six Q-sort sessions to prioritize statements based on the results of the analysis of the online survey and (5) disseminate the findings to the community, researchers and healthcare providers.