An Evaluation of the Effectiveness of A Multidisciplinary Pain Management Intervention for Rural Adults with Chronic Pain

Abstract

Legislative barriers have limited primary care providers on the number of CNCP patients they can treat within their practice. Consequently, many patients have lost treatment for their chronic pain and chronic illnesses. Providers have refused to accept new patients with preexisting chronic pain and discharged those within their practices to stay under the limits of the law. A large number of pain patients began to go to local emergency rooms for pain management and untreated chronic illnesses. A multidisciplinary chronic pain management center has the potential to improve care and provide pain management allowing primary care providers to exclusively treat chronic illnesses. The primary goal of this project was to evaluate the effectiveness of a multidisciplinary pain intervention on quality of life (QOL), anxiety, depression, and pain in rural adults with CNCP. Using a pretest/posttest design, 107 participants were evaluated on QOL, anxiety, depression, and pain prior to entering a six month multidisciplinary pain management program. Options of five interventions, (i.e., physical therapy, mental health assessment, psychological counseling, individual educational sessions with a registered nurse (RN) monthly, and pain specialty interventions), were given to participants. The sample was required to complete three of the five multidisciplinary interventions within 6 months before posttest scores were considered for the evaluation. All participants received primary care for their chronic illnesses outside of the pain management center during their participation in the program. Paired sample t-tests demonstrated that there was a statistically significant decrease in anxiety, depression, and pain scores, and an increase in QOL from pretest to posttest.