Interprofessional Guide to Pain Management

Course overview

Virtually all healthcare professionals help patients who are experiencing pain; physicians, nurses, therapists, psychologists, pharmacists, respiratory therapists, radiologic technologists, and social workers each play a specific role in pain management. With such complex physiologic, emotional, and psychological interplay, no single discipline completely understands pain, and how or why it manifests in individual patients. To provide comprehensive team-based care, healthcare professionals must understand the limits of their own expertise while gaining insight from and an appreciation for that of other disciplines. This requires healthcare professionals to collaborate to better assess, understand, and manage patients with complex pain. By working together for the common goal of developing an effective, safe, comprehensive patient-centered treatment plan, patients with pain who don't respond to usual treatments can have more positive outcomes.