More Skills, Less Pills
More Skills session
Wednesday 18 September, 9.30am – 1pm
Thanks for joining us on our More Skills, Less Pills workshop, and welcome to your first session – More Skills.
Your Zoom link for the session
Before the day
1. Pre-workshop questionnaire
If this is the first session you’re attending, please follow the link and complete the pre-workshop questionnaire.
If you have already attended a ‘less pills’ session and have therefore previously completed the questionnaire, you do not need to do it again – the pre-workshop questionnaire only needs to have been completed once.
After you’ve attended both sessions we’ll ask you complete a post-worshop questionnaire so you can assess how much you’ve learned and increased in confidence. This will also help us to assess and improve our training for the future.
2. Pre-session resources
Please familiarise yourself with the resources below. We will be exploring these further during the session.
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.
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.
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.
Your trainers
Your trainers for this session will be Diarmuid Denneny, Laura Hissey and Mark Agathangelou.
We look forward to welcoming you to the session!