Edmund Keogh

Background: Pain is one of the most prevalent health issues in Europe, yet the quality of pain education for healthcare professionals remains unclear. This study assessed the status of undergraduate and postgraduate pain education for nurses, physicians, psychologists, and physiotherapists across Europe, identifying key strategies to enhance training and improve healthcare outcomes. Methods: A study using multiple methods was conducted, comprising a scoping review, an online survey of educators, and qualitative interviews with EFIC chapters and professional educational bodies. Results: The scoping review of 11 studies revealed a paucity of evidence, with significant heterogeneity in the hours dedicated to pain training and inconsistencies in both content, teaching, and assessment methods across European curricula. The survey of educators ( n = 511) showed wide variability in pain education coverage, with psychology curricula particularly underrepresented compared to the more structured programmes in medicine and physiotherapy. The interviews highlighted curriculum constraints, lack of resources, and limited specialised staff as key barriers. They also underscored the importance of integrating pain education across all disciplines through international and interdisciplinary collaboration to enhance training efforts. Conclusions: Significant gaps persist in the depth, consistency, and delivery of pain education for undergraduate and postgraduate health professionals across Europe. The absence of standardised, evidence‐based curricula underscores the need for consistent pain education across all disciplines. Implementing targeted educational standards, increasing interdisciplinary training, and supporting qualified educators are essential to address this fragmented landscape. Standardising pain education has the potential to greatly improve patient outcomes by equipping healthcare professionals with more effective pain management skills. Significance Statement: This multiple method study provides an updated and comprehensive overview of the current state of pain education for healthcare professionals in Europe at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Substantial gaps remain in the depth, consistency, and delivery of pain education for both undergraduate and postgraduate healthcare professionals across Europe. This underscores the need to enhance pain education at the undergraduate level, with EFIC's existing medicine and physiotherapy resources offering potential models, alongside wider efforts to implement comprehensive postgraduate training. Standardising the delivery of targeted pain education has the potential to greatly improve patient outcomes by equipping healthcare professionals with more effective pain management skills.

Technology offers possibilities for quantification of behaviors and physiological changes of relevance to chronic pain, using wearable sensors and devices suitable for data collection in daily life contexts. We conducted a scoping review of wearable and passive sensor technologies that sample data of psychological interest in chronic pain, including in social situations. Sixty articles met our criteria from the 2783 citations retrieved from searching. Three-quarters of recruited people were with chronic pain, mostly musculoskeletal, and the remainder with acute or episodic pain; those with chronic pain had a mean age of 43 (few studies sampled adolescents or children) and 60% were women. Thirty-seven studies were performed in laboratory or clinical settings and the remainder in daily life settings. Most used only 1 type of technology, with 76 sensor types overall. The commonest was accelerometry (mainly used in daily life contexts), followed by motion capture (mainly in laboratory settings), with a smaller number collecting autonomic activity, vocal signals, or brain activity. Subjective self-report provided “ground truth” for pain, mood, and other variables, but often at a different timescale from the automatically collected data, and many studies reported weak relationships between technological data and relevant psychological constructs, for instance, between fear of movement and muscle activity. There was relatively little discussion of practical issues: frequency of sampling, missing data for human or technological reasons, and the users' experience, particularly when users did not receive data in any form. We conclude the review with some suggestions for content and process of future studies in this field.

Pain is a major source of global suffering, with women bearing the greatest burden. Alongside biology, psychological and social factors, including gender, help explain these differences. However, there has been no direct attempt to develop a unified social psychological model of men and women’s pain. By drawing on approaches to both gender and pain, a gender context model of pain is presented. It proposes that pain is partly influenced by the gender context in which it occurs, which operates at both individual and interpersonal levels. The model is used to structure an appraisal of the existing evidence around gender and pain, and explore whether the model helps explain why such variation occurs. It is argued that despite evidence for an association between gender and pain, there are empirical gaps that need to be addressed. Implications and directions for future investigations into sex, gender and pain are considered.

An abstract is unavailable. This article is available as a PDF only.

Pain signals the presence of potential harm, captures attention, and can inhibit performance on concurrent tasks. What is less well known, however, is whether such attentional capture also occurs in a wider social context, such as when observing people in pain. In order to explore this possibility, we adopted a novel social-cue detection methodology: the bodies-in-the-crowd task. Two experiments are reported that consider whether nonverbal cues of pain, happiness and anger as expressed through body postures would capture and hold attention. Both experiments recruited 40 (20 male, 20 female) pain-free individuals. Overall, results show that pain postures do not capture attention any more than happiness or anger postures, but disengagement from pain postures was significantly slower across both studies. Gender differences were also found, and were more likely to be found, when crowds comprised both men and women. Male pain postures were more likely to capture attention. Whilst female observers had faster target detection speed, and were quicker to disengage from distractors. They also showed slower disengagement from female expressions overall. Male observers showed no variation based on target or distractor gender. Implications and potential directions for future research are discussed.