Update August 2021 – TraumaPain has now closed to recruitment
Pain is an expected and often appropriate experience that usually follows traumatic injury. By contrast, chronic pain and disability are unhelpful and common sequelae of trauma-related injuries. Gaining an understanding of why some people develop chronic and disabling post-traumatic pain is therefore a priority for individual patients, the military and society at large. Notwithstanding, the mechanisms that underlie the transition from acute to chronic disabling post-traumatic pain are not fully understood. Such knowledge would facilitate the development and implementation of a clinical pathway of care that matches interventions to projected risk of poor recovery, with the aim of preventing poor long-term outcomes. The planned project stems from advances in knowledge relating to the assessment and management of pain, and the quantification of potential predictive factors to inform personalised rehabilitation; identifying which patients to target with rehabilitation and when and how to target them.