Frequently asked questions about Live Well with Pain’s Health and Wellbeing Check
Is my information kept private?
Yes. Live Well with Pain’s Health and Wellbeing Check is a completely anonymous multiple choice survey. It doesn’t ask for your name or collect any personally identifying information. So nothing is saved that can be linked back to you as an individual.
If you choose to save your completed Health and Wellbeing Check as a PDF, this is only stored on your own computer – and again, since it doesn’t include your name, there is no way of identifying information in it as being about you.
What happens to my answers?
The numbers from users’ responses are added together. Over time these aggregated figures help us understand more about the experience of persistent pain.
Insights from the figures enable Live Well with Pain to advocate for improvements in services for people with pain.
Why share my Health and Wellbeing Check PDF?
When you’re working with a health care professional to manage your pain, it’s often useful to have things written down.
Taking a printout of your completed Health and Wellbeing Check to your appointement can help you both focus on the key issues that matter to you.
Your practitioner will be able to help you interpret the results. They can also talk to you about next steps in tackling any issues you’ve highlighted as priorities for action.
What do the numbers in the Health and Wellbeing Check mean?
The scoring system is designed to indicate things like ‘mood health’ and levels of ‘pain distress.’ For an explanation of how to interpret the numbers used, see Interpreting your results.
Where have the questions in the Health and Wellbeing Check come from?
Step 1 for the person to complete uses the World Health Organisation’s Mental Well Being Scale which asks about five emotional areas which may have affected the patient in the previous two weeks.
The scale has been validated for people with chronic pain and many other health conditions. It has been translated into more than 30 languages and is used across the globe.
In Step 2, the pain management questions come from the Pain Self Efficacy Questionnaire – PSEQ-2. It was developed by Michael K. Nicholas, Brendan E. McGuire, and Alireza Asghari in 2014. They created the PSEQ-2 as a 2-item short form of the original 10-item PSEQ to reduce the burden on both respondents and assessors.
Step 3 is based on the 13 area Health Needs Assessment developed by Frances Cole, one of the founders of Live Well with Pain. Step 4 is part of the same self assessment tool.
My healthcare worker hasn’t heard of the Health and Wellbeing Check – what do I do?
There are lots of tools out there to support people with persistent pain. This one is increasingly well known but not everyone in the healthcare world has heard about it yet. Point them in the direction of Live Well with Pain’s website (livewellwithpain.co.uk). They will find lots of useful resources to support their work and will no doubt appreciate you having brought it to their attention!
