2022 Global Year “Translating Pain Knowledge to Practice”

By Tim Austin, who is a Specialist Pain Physiotherapist (as awarded by the College of Physiotherapists in 2021) working in the Inner West of Sydney..

The IASP Global Year for 2022 titled “Translating Pain Knowledge to Practice” is in full swing. Between now and the end of 2022, the APS Newsletters will highlight key aspects of the Global Year and promote selected available resources.

The aim of the 2022 Global year is “to increase the awareness of clinicians, scientists, and the public of our accumulating pain knowledge and of how this may be used for the benefit of those living with pain”. Clearly, the result of research and advocacy in pain is to improve the lives of pain sufferers. This reminds clinicians that it is not just about increasing their knowledge. Rather, we all need to consider how improving (clinician) knowledge might benefit patients.

There are many aspects relevant to the translation topic. The theme is not just about clinicians finding out what researchers discover! Rather, there are issues related to quality of research, communication between clinicians, pain phenotyping, process-based understanding of pre-clinical trials to clinical trials, production of clinical guidelines, and much more.

The IASP has identified a number of areas in which there is a paucity of knowledge, hence the need for more and higher quality research. Some of these are in emerging fields, such as genetics.

As noted earlier, research methods feature highly as a target for improvement. Improving research quality would potentially reduce the need for numerous studies on the same topic. Also, improving the overall strategy for the sequence in which studies are undertaken would provide evidence for new treatments more rapidly. This “satellite” view of research could enable advocacy to bring those treatments to patients earlier.

The IASP has produced several fact sheets related to the Global Year topic (as they do every year). These are freely available for everyone to see on the IASP website, and links have been provided through our APS website. Given the multi-disciplinary composition of the APS, it is delightful to see such a broad cross-section of the pain community covered by the 12 Global Year

Factsheets. Over the next few months, some of these fact sheets will be specifically discussed in the APS newsletters.

The APS proudly supports and promulgates the information related to the IASP Global Years. The APS has always strongly emphasised the need for “ever improving” pain management health care. APS members with “eagle-eyes” might have noticed a very recent update of the APS website landing page: The Board of the APS recently decided to change the APS Mission Statement to a Purpose Statement, which is “to advance pain management through education, research, and advocacy for transformational improvements in clinical care.” The APS has always been an organisation focused on translation of knowledge into clinical practice! In recent years, the APS Annual Scientific Meeting uses the Global Year title as its theme and includes a named lecture on the topic. At the recent 2022 Scientific Meeting, Professor Mark Hutchinson gave a most appropriately Global Year-named lecture “Bench to Boardroom” to describe the process of bringing new research to a meaningful clinical (and societal) conclusion. If you didn’t get to the conference, you missed out on a wonderful and inspirational talk. A summary of the talk was featured earlier in this edition of the newsletter. You can also catch up on the recording here, or check out the summary on the APS blog!

So, why don’t you go to the APS and IASP websites and explore the information on offer. We will provide more information in upcoming newsletters.