Downloads

Ten Footsteps booklet

ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PRINTED BOOKLET If you find the Ten Footsteps on our website useful, then handy booklet is just the thing for you! It contains a summary of each of the footsteps on your self management journey, from acceptance right through to managing setbacks.

Managing setbacks

Practical advice and tips for people with persistent pain to help them build a setback plan. Can be used during a setback or, even better, during better times so the person is prepared for when a setback happens.

My SMART Goals

This A4 sheet encourages people to start thinking about goals in different areas of their life. It should be used in conjunction with the Goal setting booklet.

My Goal Ladder

Many people find it useful to think about their SMART goals like steps on a ladder. This A4 sheet will help a person to break down each goal into small, achievable steps. These can be used to build up, week by week, towards a bigger goal. It should be used in conjunction with the Goal setting booklet.

My Activity Diary

This diary or log completed by the person over at least 2-3 days helps them and others understand their current pacing style. Completing the diary enables a person to track their activities including sleep, rest, sitting or lying down periods, as well as all the activities they carry out through the 24 hours. It helps to record the minutes spent on each activity to get a fuller picture.

My Daily Pacing Plan

The person you are supporting can create a Daily Pacing Plan to help them balance and pace activities. The ABC questions can help them build their Daily Pacing Plan: A: What Activities can I pace today? B: How long before I take a Break? C: Check what is the effort level on an Effort Scale

Taking Opioids for Pain

A patient information leaflet from Opioids Aware. Developed by The Royal College of Anaesthetists Faculty of Pain Medicine, 2016

Pacing

ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PRINTED BOOKLET Pacing is a key everyday skill to learn and use for people living with persistent pain. This leaflet offers useful techniques for learning how to balance activities through the day and avoid the common 'boom and bust' cycle experienced by many with persistent pain.

Explaining Pain

This booklet explains: what persistent pain is; what is going on inside us when we experience persistent pain; why people might develop persistent pain in the first place; how it makes us feel; and what we can do about it.

Goal setting

ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PRINTED BOOKLET Achieving goals, especially for people living with persistent pain, can be difficult and challenging. One way of increasing the ability to reach goals is to develop the skill of goal setting. This leaflet for patients explains how.

Your journey with pain

People living with pain can self-complete this booklet. It uses the metaphor of a bus journey and is a great way for people to start on their journey of acceptance and where they want to focus their lives despite the pain.

Driving and Pain

Information for patients on driving whilst taking medications prescribed for pain.

Pain and the Brain

Many people have a very simple, even simplistic, way of thinking about how and why pain occurs. While this works fine in many day-to-day situations, it falls down when trying to understand persistent pain. This A4 sheet has been designed to use in consultations with your patient, to help them think about the many factors that are contributing to their experience of persistent pain.

How to Sleep Well with Pain

ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PRINTED BOOKLET This leaflet draws on recent sleep research and provides simple-to-follow guidance for patients to develop the skills they need to start getting a good night’s sleep.

Live Well with Pain leaflet

When you're working with someone on their self management confidence, you'll want to encourage them to use the Live Well with Pain website. This handy leaflet explains what Live Well with Pain offers and will encourage them to explore self management options between consultations.

Six Self Care Questions

A great way to get people thinking about self care in a constructive way, the Six Self Care Questions can be used at any stage in your work with them around managing their pain. They will be particularly useful in introducing the idea of self care to a person who has hitherto imagined that their health and wellbeing is in the hands of others.

Live Well with Pain Health and Wellbeing Check tool

The Live Well with Pain Health and Well Being Check tool is a self-completion, person-centred tool that can be shared easily with patients and clients.

The data from this completed tool will help identify the actual current impact of chronic pain on the individual and their health.

You can find a more detailed explanation of the Live Well with Pain Health and Well Being Check tool here.

A bus journey

The Bus Journey tool is a metaphor tool that can help people understand pain is part of them and their life at present. This is about learning ways to self manage pain by:

• Letting the person decide where they want to put the pain on their bus now, rather than in the driving seat or at the steering wheel.
• Supporting the person to decide what is the new direction of the bus journey, its route, new stops and which passengers they want on the bus from their family, friends and clinical team, social prescribers etc.
• Helping them set rewarding, paced goals and focus on their priorities for change.

The Great Opioid Side Effect Lottery

Often, patients being prescribed opioids for their persistent pain do not know how little benefit they offer over the long term, or how prevalent and varied are the side effects people experience.

This A4 sheet, designed to be used by clinicians in their consultations with patients, is a simple way to raise the question of benefits versus side effects.

Using a ‘lottery scratch card’ metaphor, the sheet explains that opioids only actually reduce pain for around 10% of people in the long term, and their side effects can be both wide ranging and serious.

It lists many of the side effects, and provides a number of statistics to show how common these side effects are.

Working through the list with your patient, ask them to tick those side effects they are experiencing, as a starting point for introducing the idea of a medicines review.

Ask yourself six questions

Designed for patients who have been taking Gabapentin or Pregabalin to help their long term pain for more than three months, this leaflet invites them to consider six key questions. And if their answer to any of them is ‘yes’ the leaflet provides an accessible overview of the main issues and what else, apart from opioids, a person can do to manage their persistent pain.

The Pain and Self Care Cycles

Exploring the Pain Cycle with the person you are supporting can help them recognise how pain can affect different aspects of their life in negative and self-reinforcing ways.

Also included is its companion diagram, the Self Care Cycle, which shows the positive outcomes of adopting a range of self-management approaches to undo or limit the impact of pain.

Pain is like an iceberg

Persistent pain is like an iceberg – there’s so much more to it beneath the surface. Use this sheet with your patient to explore how pain impacts many different areas of their life – areas that could be addressed using self management strategies.

Managing pain after surgery

This widely endorsed booklet developed by the British Pain Society and its partners provides invaluable information for patients. It also includes a handy timeline for prescribers to complete showing patients how soon they need to taper and stop pain medicines to avoid possible dependency.

Medicines Decision Guide

Are you wondering whether the pain medicines you take are really helping? Complete this guide and and share it with your GP, pharmacist or pain management team. It will help them understand why you may be thinking about continuing, reducing or stopping your pain medicines.

Physical activity for adults and older adults

Guidance from the Chief Medical Officers in the UK on the amount and type of physical activity people should be doing to improve their health. A useful infographic that sets out the key benefits of physical activity among adults and older adults.

Painkillers – the downside

Fun poster with a serious message – put it up in your waiting room to raise awareness of the dangers of long term opioids use to control pain. Includes a 'call to action' to talk to the healthcare team about better ways to manage pain.

An opioid thermometer

How much opioid is a person taking? The opioid thermometer helps to estimate dosing based on oral morphine equivalent dose, and can be used to guide safer prescribing. The PDF contains two versions: the first goes up to 120mg morphine per day, the second to 250mg morphine per day.