Most pain medicine consultants in the UK have anaesthetics as their base specialty. Pain medicine specialists are specially trained, qualified and revalidated, and offer integrated expert assessment and management-of-pain knowledge and skills within the context of a multidisciplinary team.

Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic severely impacted the provision of pain services. After the pandemic, the Faculty of Pain Medicine (FPM) commissioned a Gap Working Group to evaluate the state of pain services across the UK. Here’s a snapshot of what we discovered.

The gap analysis reveals that only 65% of the pain services across the country fully met the gold standard for medical involvement in pain services. Tier 1 services (community-based pain services) fared the worst, with only 33% of these services having any medical involvement. This reflects a shift towards non-medical management of chronic pain in the community. Unfortunately, this means patients will wait longer for expert diagnosis and management by pain medicine specialists. While acknowledging that not all chronic-pain patients can be seen by pain medicine specialists, there’s a need for developing pragmatic pain pathways nationally so that needy patients are escalated to pain specialist care expeditiously in a timely manner. We have recently commissioned a ‘Pragmatic Pain Pathways’ working group to address this issue found in the gap analysis.