SYMPOSIA Series
Canadian and U.S. Veterans’ Leading Experts Unite for Series About Chronic Pain Best Practices
AACIPM is promoting the dissemination of this series in the United States and encourage all stakeholders to share this high-quality, free resource with your networks.
The Chronic Pain Centre of Excellence for Canadian Veterans (CPCoE) in collaboration with leading experts from the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and United States Department of Defense (DoD) launched the Veteran and Family Well-Being Series in the Fall of 2020.
The aim of the series is to provide education on the evolution of pain management and current best practices in evidence-based interdisciplinary care. Targeting a broad audience of Veterans, case managers, and health care professionals, the series will showcase the shared priorities in both countries’ care of Veterans.
Chronic Pain, Mindfulness & Neuroplasticity
Explore two alternative methods of care that contribute to chronic pain management: a discussion of the positive benefits that Mindfulness contributes to pain management by Dr. Gregory Hariton + Neil Pearson with Veteran partner Dawn Herniman explore evidence-based research surrounding the impact of yoga in pain management.
Veteran Chronic Pain: The Impact on Families
Explore transgenerational chronic pain, which means the impact on children when one of their parents has chronic pain. This session will begin with the latest research into the topic being conducted by Dr. Melanie Noel at the University of Calgary. Dr. Noel is presently conducting a study focussed on military families. Following her presentation, Dr. Helena Hawryluk and Jerris Popik from Wounded Warriors Canada will discuss their existing programs for children and youth.
Veteran Chronic Pain: Identity and Re-Integration
This session discussed military culture and the identity of military members. Dr. Jim Thompson from the Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research (CIMVHR) and Tom Hoppe MSC, MB, CD, MA, Chair of the CPCoE Advisory Council for Veterans, will share their research and experiences on the topic. Tom Carter, Dr. Elisabeth Saxton, and Eryn Weldon from CBI Health will also join us to discuss how they work to reconnect Veterans with their families, hobbies, and lives.
The Canadian Situation
The Veterans Affairs Canada Life After Service Studies (LASS) found that 40.8 per cent of Veterans suffered from chronic pain. In this session, Dr. Jason Busse shared his analysis of the data collected. Veterans Affairs Canada funds 10 independent Operation Stress Injury (OSI) clinics. Saint Anne’s Hospital in Quebec is unique to Canada for having an interdisciplinary pain management centre and OSI clinic under the same roof and management team. With the overlap in conditions that Veterans face between chronic pain and mental health, this model allows health care providers to better engage with required specialists as part of providing care for Veterans. In this session, Josie Pierre, Manager of the pain and OSI clinic at Saint Anne’s Hospital, and her team shared their experiences in treating Veterans under this model of care.
How the Mind and Body Experience Pain
In this session Adria Fransson, a practitioner at the Michael G. DeGroote Pain Clinic in Hamilton, Ontario, shared insights from their pain program about the physiology of how pain impacts well-being. She was followed by Dr. Joy MacDermid, a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Chair in Gender, Work, and Health, who discussed the importance of sex and gender in research and introduced her project on identifying differences in chronic pain treatment needs and responses based on sex and gender in Canadian Veterans.
Outcomes of Interdisciplinary Pain Management
Dr. Friedhelm Sandbrink and Dr. Benjamin Kligler from the Veterans Health Administration returned to share their findings and the initial outcomes from their Whole Health Project. The second presentation featured Dr. Eleni Hapidou from the Michael G. DeGroote Pain Clinic who presented the results from her study highlighting the success experienced by Veterans with chronic pain once they had been enrolled in an interdisciplinary pain management program. Her study was published in the Canadian Journal of Pain in August 2020.
Stepped Care Approach to Pain Management
This symposium involved the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DOD) Dr. Diane Flynn, Dr. Patricia Poulin from The Ottawa Hospital, and McGill University’s Regina Visca. The theme for this event centred around the Stepped Care Model, a personalized pain management program based on the individual patient’s needs and responses to different types of pain management therapies.
Measuring the Effectiveness of Pain Management
The second in the series of educational symposiums featured Chester “Trip” Buckenmaier III, MD, Colonel, U.S. Army (Ret’d) from United States Department of Defense (DOD) Uniformed Services University’s (USU) Defense & Veterans Center for Integrative Pain Management (DVCIPM). Dr. Buckenmaier’s presentation focused on how new pain management strategies have been explored to address the needs of service members in the last two decades. This symposium also featured Dr. Brenda Lau, the Founder and Medical Director of CHANGEpain, an interdisciplinary pain clinic in Vancouver, British Columbia, who is leading a pilot project on virtual care for Veterans.
An Evidence-Based Approach to Pain Management
This symposium focused on a patient-centred approach to pain management and featured two researchers from the United States Veterans Health Administration, Friedhelm Sandbrink, MD and Benjamin Kligler, MD, MPH. This symposium also included the Centre of Excellence’s Dr. Jason Busse who discussed his latest research on the effectiveness of cannabis in the management of chronic pain which will be published in the British Medical Journal in Summer 2021.
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