Der Schmerz
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A comparison of chronic pain patients in outpatient and inpatient treatment settings regarding pain-related and psychological characteristics, has not yet been systematically analyzed. The core documentation and quality assurance in pain therapy (KEDOQ-Schmerz) is a quality assurance system for documentation and quality management of pain therapy in different treatment settings. The system was initiated by the German Pain Society. ⋯ The results indicate that pain therapy in specialized pain settings more and more has to manage patients with higher pain chronification, higher pain-related stress and previous therapy experience. The differences in patient characteristics between treatment settings are mostly clinically unimportant. Differences in clinical features do not declare the allocation to one treatment setting or the other.
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Pain intensity (PI) is a common outcome parameter in effectiveness studies on interdisciplinary multimodal pain therapy (IMPT), despite the fact that IMPT highlights dealing with rather than reducing chronic pain. Moreover, the measurement of pain intensity as a highly subjective experience is problematic. Patient participation is absolutely essential to examine the relevance of PI as a criterion of treatment success as well as to select/develop suitable measurement methods. ⋯ The focus group discussions suggested that, due to the highly subjective nature of PI, as well as (verbal) inaccuracies and a lack of standardization in common instruments, the measurement of pain intensity is a challenging task. These limitations should be taken into account in future studies.
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Interdisciplinary pain treatment has been shown to be effective for children and adolescents with chronic pain, both in an outpatient and inpatient setting. Until now, the effectiveness has been analyzed with various outcome measures. Although it has only rarely been used for adolescents so far, Chronic Pain Grading (CPG) developed by Von Korff could be an appropriate general outcome measure. ⋯ The study shows that the CPG is an appropriate outcome measure to display the long-term effectiveness of an inpatient and outpatient interdisciplinary pain treatment. The interdisciplinary pain treatment needs to be better tailored to girls to improve its effectiveness.
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In 2009 the diagnosis chronic pain disorder with somatic and psychological factors (F45.41) was integrated into the German version of the International Classification of Diseases, version 10 (ICD-10-GM). In 2010 Paul Nilges and Winfried Rief published operationalization criteria for this diagnosis. In the present publication the ad hoc commission on multimodal interdisciplinary pain therapy of the German Pain Society now presents a formula for a clear validation of these operationalization criteria of the ICD code F45.41.