Community Chronic Pain Service

Tender description

Overview  HCCG is procuring a Community Chronic Pain Service as part of the CCG’s Transformation Agenda and the NHS’s Out of Hospital Agenda.  A review of the secondary care service model for pain concluded that it is unsustainable, because increasing numbers of patients are being referred to secondary care.  An extensive consultation was also conducted to understand patient experiences of using pain services. Patients generally had positive experiences once seen by a pain specialist. However, HCCC have designed the outcomes based service specification in order to address the following key points that arose during the consultation: • Patients feeling despondent that GPs don’t understand their condition. • Patients feeling that GPs are not aware of alternatives to secondary care treatment other than physiotherapy, and that there is a lack of health literacy about chronic pain. • Some patients have a long term reliance on pain medication that they know has side effects but they are not aware of alternative ways of managing their condition. • Patients frustrated that they have to wait so long to be seen by a pain specialist. • A reliance, in many cases, for several years on spinal injection therapy that they themselves know is not a cure but “only a short term fix” and never being discharged from the hospital. • Having an expectation that the healthcare system will resolve their pain and waiting for this to happen before becoming activated to help themselves.