2008 CCOE Award Recipients

UW Health Pain Care Services/Pain Treatment and Research Center University of Wisconsin-Madison

UW Health Pain Care Services provides compassionate, high-quality pain care across the health continuum. Multidisciplinary teams work together across inpatient and outpatient settings and departments to provide pain care to both adults and children. The Pain and Headache Clinics provide outpatient rehabilitation for persons with chronic pain. Teams of physicians, midlevel providers, rehabilitation therapists, psychologists, and nurses work to reduce pain and restore function. In the inpatient setting, interdisciplinary consultation services work with the patient’s primary treatment team to address acute pain problems, coordinate secondary consultations, and promote continuity of care. UW Health offers a full range of interventional blocks, joint injections, implants, and neuraxial analgesia for patients with all types of pain, including acute, chronic, and cancer pain. Patients also have access to both inpatient and outpatient integrative medicine, addiction medicine, palliative care, and mental health services.

In 2007, staff members distributed educational tools on headache care to all of the system’s primary care providers and to headache patients discharged from the emergency department. A regional headache symposium teaches the community how to manage this disorder. This year, the team will offer a course on pain management skills for regional primary care providers. An annual comprehensive pain board review symposium draws a national audience. The team also works with health insurers to define best-practice guidelines for pain management and procedure coverage and consults with nursing facilities and the state correctional system.

Staff members are actively involved in improving clinical care through quality improvement, pain research, and education. Members regularly share findings and experience through publication. UW Health Pain Care Services maintains a comprehensive online pain management resources index. The team’s public Web site at www.uwhealth.org/pain features pain care information, self-help documents, referral instructions, and video tutorials.

Pediatric Pain Management Center Oregon Health Science University/Doernbecher Children’s Hospital Portland, OR

When children and adolescents are in pain, creative solutions are often needed. An interdisciplinary, family-centered approach supports this program’s mission to bring quality compassionate care to children with painful conditions. If families live outside the major metropolitan area, access is tackled head on by offering novel Web-based distance treatment to deliver the psychological portion of their interdisciplinary pain care.