Library
APS Bulletin • Volume 19, Number 2, 2009
Pain Clinic Perspectives
Steven Stanos, DO, Department Editor
CCOE Spotlight: M. D. Anderson Cancer Center
Liz Newman, APS Managing Editor
APS honored five U.S. programs that exemplify the provision of outstanding clinical care and presented the awards to those programs at the 28th Annual Scientific Meeting Clinical Centers of Excellence (CCOE) and Awards Gala in San Diego, CA. These programs provide patient-centered, state-of-the-art, evidence-based, cost-conscious, culturally appropriate care; provide appropriate access to interdisciplinary and multimodal care and other specialists from a variety of disciplines to ensure expert care; act as local champions to improve pain management; demonstrate innovation and serve as models of excellence for pain management; actively work with other healthcare organizations and the community to improve the quality of pain management; and demonstrate a commitment to advancing scientific knowledge related to pain.
The team from the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center received their award at the
APS Awards Gala in San Diego, CA.
|
The CCOE in Pain Management awards program began in 2007 to acknowledge and honor U.S.-based, multidisciplinary healthcare teams who provide the most distinguished, comprehensive pain care. The Pain Management Center in the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas, Department of Pain Medicine, in Houston, TX, was one of the five programs that received this great honor in 2009. The team decided to apply for the award because of their hard work throughout the past year. “Our team had worked very hard on improving the way we work together to benefit our patients. We also realized the importance of our unique mission, which is to help patients manage cancer pain. Our team is uniquely qualified to address that mission,” said Diane Novy, PhD, professor at the Pain Management Center.
The Pain Management Center in the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center provides a full spectrum of multidisciplinary care for both acute and chronic cancer pain. To carry out this mission, the program utilizes interdisciplinary chronic pain team members who provide comprehensive pain evaluation and treatment, medical management, psychological evaluation and therapies, and more. The Pain Management Center believes adequate pain relief for cancer patients is integral to cancer treatment. The team oversees the assessment and management of cancer pain from the time of diagnosis, through curative treatment, during survivorship, and at the end of life. In order to focus on this continuity of care, the group utilizes anesthesiologists, physical medicine and rehabilitation practitioners, neurologists, nurses, psychologists, social workers, and chaplains. Novy said, “Our institution has so many wonderful resources for patients and we have so many different healthcare teams to work with as we help our patients.” In addition to being a multidisciplinary group, the center is uniquely focused. “We are a separate department within the division of anesthesiology at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center that focuses solely on clinical care, training, and research in pain,” Novy added.
The center also focuses its efforts on advancing scientific knowledge related to pain and providing information to colleagues through clinical research, peer-reviewed articles, and presenting in-service programs and lectures. The center’s clinical research focuses on chemotherapy-induced neuropathic pain, fatigue, breakthrough pain, and noninvasive and interventional procedures for pain control. Basic science research tackles cellular and molecular mechanisms of pain and the development of novel analgesics. Educational research is highly concentrated team training.
In addition, the center hosts visiting medical and nursing colleagues from throughout the world. They train six fellows and 50 residents in clinical care annually. Twenty basic science and graduate students receive training each year, too. They are very active with state pain management initiatives, leading acute and chronic cancer pain care workshops for health organizations in Texas. The center’s team wrote a pain medicine guidebook, which was distributed to more than 30,000 physicians in Texas. In addition, they contributed to the Texas Pain Society Opioid Agreement/Informed Consent. The team members at the center are the founders of the Gulf Coast Cluster for Translational Pain Research and will host the 2nd Annual Coast Translational Pain Research Symposium in 2009.
