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8. A new way to measure chronic pain at work (with Dr Martin Stevens)
Manage episode 472241264 series 3611936
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Chronic pain is pain as one of the most prominent causes of disability worldwide. In England alone, around 15.5 million people (34% of the population) experience chronic pain and about 12% struggling to take part in daily activities, including work.
When we think about the impact of chronic pain on our ability to work, as researchers we’ve tended to measure the direct effects on productivity in the workplace, but for people living with persistent pain the qualitative impacts extend far beyond this.
My guest today is Dr Martin Stevens, a research fellow from Leeds University. He and research colleagues at Aberdeen University have been exploring how we can better understand the impacts of chronic pain in the workplace. QUantifying the Impact of Chronic pain on engagement in paid work, or The QUICK Study for short, is a research project that has worked closely with people living with chronic pain to develop a survey instrument that captures the multi-dimensional impacts of pain at work.
From the fluctuating nature of pain, to impaired cognition, to disclosure and support for job modifications, to the effects on stamina and the ability to recharge – this work is arming researchers with a finely tuned instrument to tell a more robust story about the impacts of chronic pain at work from those who experience it first-hand.
Our conversation also highlights the importance of involving people with lived experience into the research process from the ground level. Patient and Public Involvement (or PPI), as it’s known in the UK, has become a requirement of public funding for healthcare research, but the complexities of how we do this work as researchers is not something we hear discussed so I was glad we had the opportunity to talk in-depth about this process.
Links
https://www.abdn.ac.uk/iahs/academic/epidemiology/our-research/studies-list/quick/
https://academic.oup.com/occmed/article/74/Supplement_1/0/7707348
https://medicinehealth.leeds.ac.uk/staff/12305/dr-martin-stevens
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