A 1996 congressional mandate founded the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Pain Consortium (www.painconsortium.nih.gov). The NIH Pain Consortium includes representatives from 24 NIH Institutes and Centers. Its purpose is to coordinate the NIH's pain research and dissemination activities. In 2010, the NIH Pain Consortium held a workshop on the state of pain education in the education of future health care providers, including medical, dental, nursing, and pharmacy schools. The findings of this workshop were distressing. Although pain is the most commonly problem faced in medical practice, it receives relatively little attention in the education of health care providers. For example, on average, medical students receive only 8 hours of training on how to measure, diagnose, and treat pain. Relatedly, pain often is poorly treated, with some patients receiving the wrong pain treatment or far less medication than is warranted to provide relief, and others receiving too much medication, which places the patient at a high risk of addiction to pain medications. This situation is especially problematic since 100 million people in the United States suffer from persistent pain, and prescription pain medication abuse has reached epidemic proportions in the United States, with nearly 15,000 people dying each year as a result of In an effort to help improve pain treatment while reducing the prescription pain medication epidemic, the NIH Pain Consortium, in an effort led by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), created an initiative to increase pain education in medical, nursing, pharmacy, and dental schools across our nation. The plan included support of Pain Champions at health care schools, who were people in these institutions who already realized the need to increase pain education, and could, with support from the NIH Pain Consortium, increase pain education in their institutions. The NIH Pain Consortium also remains committed to increasing and improving pain education even beyond the institutions that receive associated NIH funding. Thus, the funded Pain Champions are required to create interactive teaching tools, which other institutions can freely download and use to teach their students about pain and its treatment. the abuse of prescription pain medication. Key people in these health care crises are health care providers, who in general lack the necessary training to adequately treat pain or identify and minimize the risks of pain medication abuse or diversion by their patients. While the NIH Pain Consortium was building support for this initiative, the Institute of Medicine released a report mandated by the Affordable Care Act titled Relieving PAIN America. A Blueprint for Transforming Prevention, Care, Education, and Research. Education of health care providers on treating pain was a major emphasis of this report. Two recommendations in particular were: ? Recommendation 4-2 Improve curriculum and education for health care professionals. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Health Resources and Service Administration, accrediting organizations, and undergraduate and graduate health professions training programs should improve pain education curricula for health care professionals, and ? Recommendation 4-3. Increase the number of health professionals with advanced expertise in pain care. Educational programs for medical, dental, nursing, mental health, physical therapy, pharmacy, and other health professionals who will participate in the delivery of pain care should have increased capacity to train providers who can offer advanced pain care. With this additional mandate and guideline, in 2012 the NIH Pain Consortium selected certain health professional schools as designated Centers of Excellence in Pain Education (CoEPEs). The CoEPEs are acting as hubs for the development, assessment, and distribution of pain management curriculum resources for medical, dental, nursing, and pharmacy schools to enhance and improve the teaching of health care professionals about pain and its treatment. These CoEPEs are increasing pain education in their institutions. They represent approximately 100 teaching units (departments, universities, teaching hospitals, etc.). They also are creating interactive web-based teaching modules for use in the CoEPEs and any other interested teaching institutions. Further, the CoEPEs plan to assess the success of their pain teaching programs and disseminate their results to the general health care education field to encourage other institutions to follow the lead of the CoEPEs and increase pain education. The NIH Pain Consortium supports the general principle that better education will lead to better treatment. In addition, the NIH Pain Consortium supports the persuasive argument that better pain treatment is necessary.
