Relief in sight for chronic pain sufferers as program expands

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This article was published 15/01/2024 (634 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Long wait times for chronic pain consultations have been cut in half and a further program expansion is in the works, officials say.

However, thousands of patients are still waiting for their first appointment.

Craig Hillier, provincial director of the Manitoba Pain Care Program, said about 4,000 patients are waiting for an initial appointment and the clinic doesn’t track the number of existing patients who are receiving its services.

Last year, before the previous Tory government announced a planned expansion of the program and additional funding of up to $4 million annually, the wait time was up to 40 months. Now, patients are getting their first appointment after about 20 months.

Within the first nine months of the 2023-24 fiscal year, the pain program logged an additional 4,367 patients compared to pre-COVID-19 pandemic median monthly patient volumes, Hillier said last week.

He has been in the role for about four months.

“While the wait times are still higher than we would like, the investments that we’ve had in the program to date have us seeing referrals much sooner than we previously did,” he said.

As of May 2023, there were about 1,360 patients waiting for an initial consultation.

Hillier and Brigitte Sabourin, psychologist and director of behavioural health within the pain program, said they are excited about the progress made over the past few months, adding more changes are coming to improve patient care.

About 10 to 15 additional staff have been hired, with a recruitment focus on psychologists, physical therapists and occupational therapists.

Because of the complexities of chronic pain, the research supports interdisciplinary care and the program has followed suit with a team-based approach, Sabourin said.

“It’s really an investment in the system. It’s about the quality of life of these people, but also the rest of the health-care system, in a way.”

The funding related to those new positions has flowed to the pain program and staff have been efficient, seeing more patients more quickly, while also offering virtual sessions for those with less intense needs.

“There’s lots of things that played into that ability to decrease the wait time and increase our throughput,” Hillier said.

The pain program has locations at Health Sciences Centre and the Pan Am Clinic in Winnipeg, as well as Brandon, Thompson and Selkirk.

The Selkirk clinic opened Nov. 1, 2023, and logged 106 patients in its first month. The Brandon clinic now operates three weeks per month.

There are conversations about expanding the main space at HSC, something that could happen within the next year or two, Hillier said, but no firm plans have been made.

“In the meantime, we’re efficiently using the space that we have to ensure that we get more volume of patients through the pain clinic as it exists today, and there’s lots of creative ways that we can use our space still to expand even more than we have already.”

However, one patient of the HSC pain clinic said it’s still difficult to get timely appointments, even as a regular client.

For the past five years, retired health-care worker Judy Perras has relied on targeted injections every three or four months to ease chronic spinal pain. By the time she has her upcoming appointment at the end of January, nine months will have passed between visits.

Perras said she’s contacted the clinic repeatedly, but gets a recorded phone message and is never able to speak to a staff member.

No one calls back, Perras said, and she must wait for a letter in the mail to find out when her next appointment will be.

For chronic pain sufferers, the lack of communication makes everything worse, Perras said.

“It increases my anxiety, because I don’t know whether I’m being forgotten,” she said. “You don’t know whether you’ve been added to the queue or you haven’t been added to the queue or you’ve been kicked out of the program.”

Hillier acknowledged the need for some improvements in scheduling.

“We’ve made a lot of positive improvements in a very short time, like since the spring. We know we’re doing better. That doesn’t mean that we’re where we want to be and that we don’t have some other things that we know we’re going to get fixed,” he said.

katie.may@winnipegfreepress.com