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Professor David Wynick, Director of the Integrated Pain Management Health Integration Team (HIT), gives an update on the HIT's activities in 2014-15.

The Integrated Pain Management (IPM) HIT, established in spring 2014, aims to provide a fully integrated, multi-disciplinary, lifespan clinical service for chronic pain across the Bristol and Bath area. Over the past year, we have increased our membership to include representatives from clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) and community pharmacy, as well as maintaining a core of highly specialised clinicians and researchers.

We’ve submitted a proposal to the local CCGs to pilot a multi-disciplinary community assessment pain clinic. We’re exploring developing a single clinical pain database, using an agreed core dataset of chronic pain diagnoses and medications, enabling demographic and outcome data to be captured across all HIT member trusts.

We are developing a training prospectus for qualified health professionals and academics, to showcase courses and events hosted by HIT members. The national specialist chronic pain service in Bath regularly hosts a pain forum for professionals, and IPM HIT will be supporting these events in the near future. We’re also exploring opportunities for medical trainees.

We are committed to setting up a patient and public involvement (PPI) group. We are working on developing this group, and aim to host a patient forum event within the next 9-12 months.