User review
Reviewer: Member of the public, Auckland New Zealand, October 2020
Comments: Couldn't register, even though tried various ways.
Clinical review
If guided by a relevant health professional with phone or email follow up, or self-guided for highly motivated patients.
If self-guided (due to high risk of non-adherence; however, even completing one session could be helpful.)
Reviewer: Jeremy Steinberg, GP, FRNZCGP
Date of review: March 2020
Comments: painTRAINER is the name for the Australian version of a programme previously known as PainCoach. It is an interactive 8-week web course that teaches pain education and pain coping skills. The pain education section is didactic with very high information density and so it is unlikely that retention will be high. Nevertheless, the subsequent pain coping skills lessons are interactive and high quality, which is the bulk of the course. I would liked to have seen more information about the benefit of graduated exercise in chronic pain. The programme has been proven to improve pain coping and function in research that mainly looked at osteoarthritis, but I suspect that it would still be useful for other pain conditions, too.
Safety concerns: None.
New Zealand relevance: Australian-based.
References
- Effects of internet-based pain coping skills training before home exercise for individuals with hip osteoarthritis (HOPE trial): a randomised controlled trial.(external link) Pain 2018 Sep;159(9):1833-1842.
- Automated internet-based pain coping skills training to manage osteoarthritis pain: a randomized controlled trial.(external link) Pain 2015 May;156(5):837-48.
- Effectiveness of an internet-delivered exercise and pain-coping skills training intervention for persons with chronic knee pain: a randomized trial.(external link) Ann Intern Med. 2017 Apr 4;166(7):453-462.
- A qualitative study of patient and provider perspectives on using web-based pain coping skills training to treat persistent cancer pain.(external link) Palliat Support Care 2018 Apr;16(2):155-169.
- "I could do it in my own time and when I really needed it": perceptions of online pain coping skills training for people with knee osteoarthritis.(external link) Arthritis Care Res (Hoboken) 2019 Oct 18.
