Calling all health professionals caring for people with cancer pain!

You are invited to participate in the development of a new, national guideline and implementation strategy for assessment and management of cancer pain, starting with an online survey of current practice taking 10-15 minutes.

Survey of current practice

The survey aims to find out how cancer pain practice and use of guidelines varies across settings and localities and to learn from health professionals’ experience of barriers and facilitators to assessment and management. It is important we hear from a representative cross-section of Australian clinicians. You do not need to have used a guideline to provide useful information.

To complete the survey, please go to: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VG9LHPN.  If the link does not work first time, please copy and paste it into your web browser.

See also the pdf version here. 

The need for an Australian cancer pain guideline and implementation strategy

Many Australians with cancer live with pain unnecessarily due to lack of appropriate assessment and management. In 2010, the National Pain Summit endorsed a new National Pain Strategy, developed with input from primary care, pain specialists, other medical specialists and consumers. Thirteen priority areas were identified, including introduction of pain as the ‘fifth vital sign’, providing accessible information for people with pain and their carers, establishing and promoting systems and guidelines to ensure adequate management and ensuring meaningful communication between practitioners and patients and between different services. Evidence suggests that guidelines are feasible and can improve pain management. However, existing international guidelines need to be adapted and an implementation strategy is needed that is targeted and tailored to Australian health service settings.

This project
See the ImPaCCT flier Cancer pain assessment and management – development of an Australian guideline and implementation strategy

Development of an Australian guideline and implementation strategy is being led by the Chair of the 2010 National Pain Summit’s Cancer Pain and Palliative Care Working Group, Dr Melanie Lovell, with infrastructure support from ImPaCCT (Improving Palliative Care through Clinical Trials) and funding from HammondCare.

We are inviting involvement from physicians, nurses and other health professionals working in Primary Care, Oncology, Palliative Care and other relevant specialties to participate in the following activities:

1. A national survey of current practice regarding assessment and management of cancer pain and use of guidelines;
2. Consensus meetings aimed at defining the scope and content of the Australian guideline and implementation strategy;
3. Online Delphi process aimed at refining guideline and strategy content;
4. Review of iterative guideline and strategy drafts;
5. Evaluation of the ‘final’ guideline and strategy.

We welcome individual contributions to any or all of these processes.

For more information about the survey or project more generally, please contact ImPaCCT’s Program Coordinator, Dr Tim Luckett, via t.luckett@unsw.edu.au or 02 9514 4861.