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Pain Management Programme

Hillingdon Hospital: Greenacres Centre
Telephone number: 01895 279049

This programme is an affiliate of the Chronic Pain Service and aims to help patients with longstanding pain through a variety of strategies including education about pain, improved overall fitness and gradual drug withdrawal. The ultimate aim is not just reduction of pain but also an improvement in quality of life.

talk Patients are treated in a group with short talks and practical sessions. Patients are educated about pain, undergo a graded exercise programme and are taught stress management and relaxation skills.

Chronic pain is continuous, long-term pain of more than 12 weeks. A pain management programme (PMP) is a psychologically-based rehabilitative treatment for people with chronic pain recommended by the British Pain Society.

At Hillingdon we run three different PMP’s including one for Urdu/Punjabi speakers. It is delivered in a group setting by a multidisciplinary team, on an outpatient basis. Programmes are run on a weekly outpatient basis and each session lasts for 3 hours. The overall objective is to make patients more self reliant and less dependent on healthcare resources. We do not provide prescriptions or a medical intervention.

The aim of the PMP is to build up coping strategies to help people control their pain, in order to limit its impact on the person as much as possible. There is good evidence that PMPs improve pain and function compared to non-multidisciplinary treatments. National and regional guidelines recommend PMPs for lower back pain.

The Pain Management Team is a multidisciplinary one, headed by a clinical psychologist and assisted by physiotherapists and occupational therapists, all of who have considerable experience in the management of people with longstanding pain.