This course is designed to turn difficult pain clinic consultations into positive conversations.

Participants will learn skills which will help manage controversial scenarios, such as de-prescribing, avoiding interventions and dealing with angry and upset patients, whilst empowering patients to self-manage their pain. The course will use a wide variety of educational techniques, including medical actors, making it highly interactive, practical and fun.

The day is suitable for anaesthetists and pain clinicians of all levels and experience.

Learning objectives:

• To support behaviour change in daily practice
• To encourage patients to solve their own problems
• To reduce confrontation
• To improve clinician and patient satisfaction from consultations
• To champion and smooth the transition to non-medical services

The course content aligns with national priorities, which include sharing decision making, personalising care and reducing reliance on dependence-forming medications, informed by the following documents:

• NHS long term plan
• NHSE universal personalised care
• Shared decision making
• Reducing medication/deprescribing
• Opioids aware   

Course Format

The content of the course is based on evidence from the Health Foundation co-creating health initiative. 

The day starts with the background to the course and the relevance of considering new communication and consultation skills. 

We then cover 4 essential elements of the consultation in sequence, describing and demonstrating key skills.  We explore readiness to change, agreeing an agenda for the consultation, problem solving and following up.  Skills include elements from coaching and motivational interviewing.

The afternoon is devoted to practicing skills with professional actors, using genuine and difficult pain clinic scenarios.

Feedback from previous courses:

• Great insight to exploring new skills to use with patients
• Good start eg not jumping in with referral reason
• A much needed course
• Hopefully it will become a regular feature
• Practicing the techniques repeatedly really helped consolidate the theory
• Very useful day overall
• Has provided a framework to take away and use in practice.
• The amount of practice.
• Good content
• Did very well to condense into a 1 day course
• I think this course should be a compulsory component of advanced pain training- very useful.
• Useful introduction of framework.
• In general a very strong course
• The facilitators were knowledgeable
• The course was kept relevant to pain medicine
• Important that the course was face to face
• Overall excellent, better than I expected. I highly recommend and feel it is an essential course

Facilitators: Helen Makins, Dimple Vyas, Allistair Dodds and Sheila Black