Driving Needed Change in Pain Education.

Abstract

Despite public health crises of prescription opioid abuse and inadequate treatment of pain, despite calls from blue-ribbon panels for better clinician training in pain and pain treatment, and despite earnest efforts by individual clinicians, professional societies, and educators, we have failed to provide high-quality pain management training for our nation’s health professionals [1,2]. The 2013 Institute of Medicine report on Pain in America stated, “Education is a central part of the necessary cultural transformation of the approach to pain,” and recommended improving the curriculum and education for health care professionals [1]. The 2016 National Pain Strategy from the US Department of Health and Human services concurred: “Most health care professions’ education programs devote little time to education and training about pain and pain care” [2]. Why have we not made more progress educating clinicians about pain when, ironically, pain is so prevalent in our population? I suggest two reasons for this failure—which, in turn, suggest two solutions. The first reason is bypassing the fundamental step of defining and implementing expected competencies in pain management that should result from clinical education. Extensive efforts over several decades to increase pain curricula have focused on the the content of education without attending to the important initial step of …