Around one in five Australians live with chronic pain, a number projected to rise in future years. Chronic pain is one of the world's major healthcare needs, with serious financial and social implications for individuals, families and communities.
Best practice in pain management involves care delivered by inter- and multi-disciplinary teams under the sociopsychobiomedical approach. Despite the need for skilled health practitioners from multiple disciplines to address the growing burden of pain on the community, there is generally limited pain management content in health practitioner education at all levels worldwide. In Australia, pain management education varies greatly across health practitioner disciplines, geographic locations and education stages.
National standards will provide a framework for the development and delivery of pain management education, ensuring consistency across disciplines and education sectors. The standards will be a set of concise statements that act as quality markers for health practitioner pain management education. They will provide a valuable benchmark to regulators when assessing education programs.
Importantly, the standards will provide a template for changing the way in which we develop and deliver pain education to ensure that it is accessible and relevant for all. The national standards will assist in ensuring a consistent approach to pain management education across disciplines and support internal consistency between the stages/levels of a health practitioner’s education journey.
These standards will be aspirational with the aim of improving the care of individuals experiencing pain.
The standards will:
- be relevant across multiple health practitioner disciplines and levels of education;
- be underpinned by the values and principles of the National Strategy for Health Practitioner Pain Management Education;
- provide a framework for the development and delivery of pain management education, ensuring consistency across disciplines and educations sectors within Australia;
- provide a template for changing the way that pain education is developed and delivered to ensure that it is accessible and relevant for all;
- and be inclusive of the needs of priority populations.
A ‘Governance Advisory Group’, with relevant stakeholder representation, is currently being established to provide advice and feedback to the project team throughout.
An environmental scan and literature review will be undertaken to analyse related standards nationally and internationally, and to identify best-practice methods of ‘standards development’ that are applicable to this project.
To ensure that the standards arising from this project are accepted across the education and health sector it will be vital to incorporate extensive stakeholder consultation. Stakeholder consultation forums will be conducted across Australia with broad representation from all relevant stakeholder groups. We will expand on the existing network of 120 stakeholders who participated in the development of the National Strategy for Health Practitioner Pain Management Education (2023) to include broader education sector representation.
The consultation process will entail an ‘iterative’ co-design process ensuring a ‘partnership’ approach in the generation of standards.
There will also be a focus on developing pain education standards that are inclusive of the needs of priority sub-populations including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, rural and remote populations, people living with disabilities, children and adolescents.
This will be followed by analysis, coding and validation of workshop outcomes, and further stakeholder consultation as required. Draft standards will be distributed broadly for feedback then finalised and submitted to government.