Considering a career in regional and rural pain medicine?

Specialist pain medicine is essential everywhere, but in regional and rural communities, the need is greatest. People living outside major cities often face higher rates of chronic pain and limited access to specialist care. 

While gaining broad clinical experience and developing leadership and flexible skills, practising in these areas gives you the chance to make a real difference by:

• Delivering multidisciplinary, evidence-based care where it’s needed most.
• Shaping and innovating local services to meet the unique needs of the community.
• Building long-term relationships with patients and healthcare teams. 
• Improving healthcare equity and patient outcomes in under-served regions.

In early 2024, the faculty received funding to explore flexible accreditation pathways for pain medicine in rural areas through the Flexible Approach to Training in Expanded Settings (FATES) grant. Over two years, the faculty undertook extensive consultation and research to develop these pathways to pilot across regional settings, building capacity of regional settings to provide pain medicine training locally.

Pathways developed consider flexibility around training locations, supervision arrangement, telehealth input and tailoring the scope of practice of pain medicine to the local context.

Regional and rural settings considering how they can grow their capacity to provide training locally are encouraged to contact us to discuss how the flexible accreditation options may be incorporated in their settings.

This work, and the faculty’s ongoing commitment to addressing the gaps in rural and regional pain medicine will help build a sustainable pain specialist workforce outside our major cities “and promote equity of access across regional, rural and remote communities.” - ANZCA Bulletin, Summer 2025 edition