Pain services have now been in existence for 40 years across both Royal Preston Hospital and Chorley District Hospital and see up to 2000 new patients annually. As the regional pain unit, Lancashire Teaching Hospitals deliver more consultant-led clinical sessions in pain medicine than any other hospital in the North West region.
The pain service at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals was started by Dr Ray Consiglio who ran the whole service on his own at the time. The first labour epidural was done in the hospitals in 1981. The service and the team have now developed and grown to include eight consultants, three chronic pain nurse specialists, four inpatient nurse specialists, two psychologists, two physiotherapists, two healthcare assistants, and six secretaries making up the team.
The pain service has gone from strength to strength during this time; helping patients to recover from and manage their pain. In 1990, the acute pain service was introduced to provide additional support for patients during their time in the hospitals. Subsequently a pain management programme was developed to help people to live with chronic pain by helping them to learn ways of dealing with the effects of their pain. Multi-disciplinary team clinics were then introduced to provide additional support to patient dealing with pain from an array of specialties including psychologists and physiotherapists. The team are also now getting more and more involved in research and clinical trials to improve outcomes for pain patients in the future.
The pain department has got an active research programme. There are number of academic and industry sponsored studies going on currently. Lancashire Teaching Hospitals are the first in Lancashire to participate in a phase 1, industry sponsored, lower back pain study. The hospitals have also been selected as the only site in the UK to start a first in human (FIH) study into lower back pain.
Additionally, in 2014, Lancashire Teaching Hospitals was registered as a provisional endometriosis centre by the British Society for Gynaecology (BSGE), providing multidisciplinary pain management for patients with endometriosis, which can affect areas such as the ovaries and fallopian tube, and can be a difficult condition to live with.
In 2018, Lancashire Teaching Hospitals also became one of the first hospitals to start a Rapid Access Pain Service (RAPS) to prevent hospital admissions of acute on chronic pain patients presenting to the emergency departments, and making sure they received the best treatment and care for them.
The pain team at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals are continuously striving to establish excellent working relationships with partners in the community, surrounding hospitals and the clinical commissioning groups (CCGs). The team has also got excellent links with the GPs in and around Preston and Chorley.
To celebrate these achievements and how much the pain service has developed and grown over the past 40 years, a celebratory day was held at Preston Hospital on June 7th and included a range of presentations on the evolution of pain services over the last 40 years, the use of apps and digital technology in pain management, and the future of pain medicine.