Promoting Paediatric Pain Management

Thank you all for your ongoing support to promote paediatric pain management. The challenge of pain management in children’s palliative care remains an ongoing issue, and high on the agenda of many. Our work continues on the best practice guidelines linked to the revised WHO pain guidelines, and we are currently collating resources from around the world and developing a survey to go out to our members to review what medications are available in which countries. We are excited to be continuing this work along with getting together a team interested in research to look at a strategy for research into pain in children’s palliative care globally.  

We have continued to be involved in a range of webinars, providing education and information on children’s palliative care and in particular pain management for individuals from around the world. In January our webinar on pain assessment and management was very popular with 500 people from around the world registering and either joining us live or watching the recording at a later date. This demonstrates the ongoing need for sessions such as this one and for capacity building in pain assessment and management. We are also working with several organisations across the UK and Europe looking at the use of a children’s palliative outcome scale with the assessment of pain being a core component of this. Later in March we are also running a workshop on children’s palliative care, including pain assessment and management for nurses at the SIOP Africa conference in Kampala – it is our first face-to-face workshop since the start of the pandemic and we are looking forward to it.

Despite the ongoing challenges of covid, there continue to be many new and exciting opportunities ahead of us and we look forward to collaborating with many of you as we seek to improve access to children’s palliative care and pain management around the world.