Occupational Therapy and Chronic Pain Management: Overview

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Video Runtime: 22 Minutes; Learning Assessment Time: 43 Minutes
This course will highlight biopsychosocial approaches to chronic pain management and examine the interaction and relationship between physical, functional, and emotional factors affecting individuals with chronic pain conditions. Intervention strategies using the biopsychosocial approach will be presented, detailing how to address the multifactorial nature of chronic pain conditions. This course will describe a framework that can be applied when working with individuals with chronic pain in various settings and will be beneficial and most applicable to nurses, occupational therapists, and physical therapists who are working with individuals with chronic pain in acute care, inpatient rehabilitation, long-term care, home health, and outpatient settings.

Meet your instructor

Megan Kenney

Megan Kenney is an occupational therapist who graduated from the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Health and Rehab Science Occupational Therapy program in 2012. She currently works with UPMC Centers for Rehab Services as the chronic pain program director and assistant outpatient occupational therapy program director.…

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Chapters & learning objectives

1. The Biopsychosocial Nature of Chronic Pain for the Individual With Chronic Pain

This chapter will introduce the biopsychosocial model and will explain why it is important to address chronic pain intervention using this approach. This is important because the biopsychosocial model describes a holistic, macro view of the client/patient versus focusing on impairment-based intervention, acute-based (remediation) that is typically seen in the medical model, or the traditional model of care where it’s expected that intervention will return the client/patient to their assumed normal baseline.

2. Contributing Factors: Physical, Functional, and Emotional

This chapter will describe the multifactorial nature of chronic pain by explaining the importance of addressing factors that affect the client’s experience with pain, including physical, functional, and emotional changes or deficits. This is important to help learners understand that intervention is typically less successful or unsuccessful if approaching chronic pain from one perspective alone.

3. Intervention That Addresses the Needs of the Individual With Chronic Pain

This chapter will use the framework of the biopsychosocial approach and the concepts of the multifactorial nature of chronic pain to understand a comprehensive intervention. The intervention example is pacing and will use client demonstration to highlight a therapist walking a client through education on how to pace themselves physically and emotionally and how to apply pacing concepts to a chosen ADL at home for a home program. This is important to demonstrate how the concepts from chapter 1 and 2 can be applied in a real-life setting.

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