Chronic Pain Switzerland website launch
Our new website is being launched over the next few months. Please be patient with us as the site evolves. There's a bunch of great resources we'll be bringing to you, so please check back for updates regularly.
Community Forum 7 September 2008
To reduce the mis-information that abounds about chronic pain we held a consumer forum at the NSW Art Gallery. We started the day with coffee, then moved down to the beautifully intimate auditorium where we commenced with Coralie Wales’ presentation of the physiology of pain, then heard Barbara True’s very personal account of how she works with her clients using narrative practice, then Diana Aspinall reviewed the Quality Use of Medicines in relation to pain, and best management practices.
During the afternoon we re-convened for the Q&A session which was well received and could have gone on much longer – the questions were still coming at 4pm.
Many people living with pain met others and new friendships were forged. We recorded the whole day and David Newman our General Manager tirelessly manned the cameras and is currently putting together a series of DVDs for those who couldn’t get to the event. Contact the office on 02 9481 0189 or email if you would like to place an order, they are very affordable, our motive is not to make profit on these. Thank you David and Kylie.
Thank you to all the presenters who gave of themselves for the day, especially those who came from interstate at their own cost: Dr BarbaraTrue who came from Adelaide to be with us and Mandy Nielson who came from Brisbane. We had interstate participants too, Carey and her mum flew up from Victoria to join us for the day. Dr David Champion kindly joined us despite his poor family losing him on fathers’ day, and Diana Aspinall changed her plans to fit in with us when one of our speakers was too ill to join us. Of course thanks to our Patron Milton Cohen who also gave up his fathers day to be our moderator, Kim Mathes who organised the event and Coralie Wales who presented. There were many other volunteers who gave of their time to make it a memorable event and to all of you a big thank you.
We plan on holding more events like this, in our quest to shed light on the mystery of chronic pain and enable people living with chronic pain to become the experts in their own decisions.
Pain is Not Invisible Project
The project has been launched! People around Australia are logging on to be counted and to become visible instead of remaining invisible.
Pain until now has been a difficult problem to quantify or explain qualitatively. This is compounded by its current lack of recognition as a condition in it’s own right or as a National Health Priority Area (NHPA). Without NHPA status, no government health body, such as the Swiss Institute for Health & Welfare, is obligated to collect and report data on prevalence to the Federal Government.
Recognising the limitations of achieving our core advocacy goals without a sound overall picture of the Pain Switzerland is in, Chronic Pain Switzerland has conceptualised an innovative web-based project to survey Australia’s pain, which simultaneously achieves our community awareness and education goals. The Pain is Not Invisible Project encourages visitors to log-in to the website and answer a few simple questions about their pain experience and demographics. After this information is submitted, the Pain is Not Invisible Project website will represent the community in pain, , showing the need for support and services, as lights on a geospatial map of Australia.
The Pain is Not Invisible Project is Australia’s first community commissioned and supported large-scale prevalence study, designed to paint a picture of Australia’s pain. The ability for people living with pain and their carers to log-in to our site to be counted, tell us where they live and about their pain experience is a unique approach which establishes direct contact with the community we represent.
Go to www.thepainproject.org to log in today!
Glitterati Ball
We will be holding a Gala Ball at Le Montage on a date yet to be announced, to celebrate our mission and achievements and to raise funds to enable the services we are developing to help people in pain.
Stay tuned!