Live Well with Pain

I'm over halfway there - so I'm definitely going to get to Brussels to talk about people living well, and the research I completed for my PhD. I'm so excited!

There's a piece of the research to clinical practice puzzle that I think hasn't been given enough attention: how to translate what happens in the four walls of a clinic into daily life.

It's the primary domain of occupational therapists who help to bridge that gap by analysing and regulating the demands within real world contexts so that people CAN bring what they've learned in clinic to their own lives.

Occupational therapy is a complex practice. The daily lives of people are difficult to study. But this is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. This is what we (health professionals) are really working towards - helping people live the lives they want.

I've been so lucky to have had the privilege of listening to those who have learned to adjust to having chronic pain. They're heroes in the most positive sense of the word. They're raw, real and honest. What they do is LIVE rather than thinking of themselves as "pain patients". That's what I want to help people achieve when I work with them - because in the end, they will walk away from having seen me and go on living.

I want to bring the person to the centre of pain management, so that all our clinical efforts are focused on what the person in front of us can choose to do when they leave our care. That means taking some time to learn from them without preconceived ideas of what we'll find. I think that's why I enjoyed using Classical Grounded Theory as my research methodology - you need to have an open mind, able to hear the underlying messages between the words a person speaks. It's a great approach to complement the "hard data" research that so many researchers are working on.

I'm going to have such a busy mind once I get back from this conference, and best of all, I'll get to share it with people who read my blog and know that research, like people, is best when it gets translated into the real world.

Thanks so much everyone for your support, I am really encouraged and thankful for friends and family who have been so generous. As the Maori proverb says "He aha te mea nui o te ao?

He tangata! He tangata! He tangata!"

"What is the most important thing in the world? It is people! It is people! It is people!"