ACC puts pain on priority list

The Accident Compensation Corporation is looking at early treatment options for pain management because demand for such services has jumped tenfold in five years.

It said that the number of claimants receiving pain-management services had jumped from 442 in 2000 to 4098 in 2005.

ACC Healthwise acting general manager Anne O'Connell said that in the past five years pain had been treated as more of a priority. It was the most common problem people have when trying to get back to work.

A Sydney health conference was told last week that chronic pain could kill. It was costing Australia more than A$5 billion ($5.5 billion) a year in lost working days.

Michael Cousins, of the Pain Management Research Institute at Sydney's Royal North Shore Hospital, told the 11th annual World Congress on Pain that 36.5 million work days were lost each year because of chronic pain.

The week-long conference drew more than 4500 delegates from New Zealand, Australia and 83 other countries, for presentations on many aspects of pain, including the effects of surgery, trauma, burns and cancer.

Professor Cousins said acute severe pain that was not well managed could kill. "Unfortunately [chronic pain is] not well managed in more than 50 per cent of people."

He suggested clinicians adopt United States methods of assessment and treatment in which pain had been declared as "the fifth vital sign along with blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature and breathing rate".

Clinical director at Burwood Hospital's pain-management centre Ted Shipton said many sufferers would not need ongoing ACC support if they were effectively treated at the outset.

He said millions of dollars were being wasted because not enough specialists to conduct pain-management procedures were available. .

Auckland Regional Pain Service clinical psychologist Peter Waddell said persistent pain affected 10 to 20 per cent of the population.

- NZPA