Associate Professor Claire Ashton-James
Associate Professor, Pain Management, School of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney, Australia
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Dr Claire Ashton-James, PhD (Social Psychology), is an Associate Professor of Pain Management at The University of Sydney with expertise in patient-provider communication and social contributors to pain and pain management. Dr Ashton-James is the Founding Chair of the International Association for the Study of Pain Social Aspects of Pain Special Interest Group, and is a passionate advocate for greater research and clinical attention to social contributors and outcomes in pain management. Before taking up her role at the University of Sydney, Dr Ashton-James conducted her research and teaching at Duke University (USA), University of British Columbia (Canada), University of Groningen (The Netherlands) and The Free University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands). At the University of Sydney, Claire is the leader of the Social Cognition and Pain Lab, where she and her team leverage insights from social psychology to develop effective, scalable interventions to support patients and clinicians to manage acute and chronic pain.
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The Heart of the Matter: The Importance of Responding to Distress in Conversations about Pain and Pain Management
Pain is an unpleasant experience associated with variable levels of emotional distress. For clinicians work with patients in pain, exposure to patient distress is inevitable. It is crucial that clinicians recognise and respond to patient distress – negative emotions such as anxiety, anger, and hopelessness shape patients’ experiences and expectations of care, and can disrupt patient engagement in shared decision-making and deter adherence to treatment advice. Despite the potential for patient distress to derail pain management outcomes, many clinicians are not equipped with skills to identify and respond to patient negative emotions, or their own emotional response to patient distress. In this presentation, Associate Professor Ashton-James will present research into the impact of patient emotions on engagement with treatment advice, the contribution of patient distress to clinician burnout, and evidence-based strategies for responding to patient distress in a manner that builds trust, empowers patients to participate more collaboratively in their care, and protects clinicians from emotional exhaustion or burnout.
Beyond Opioid Analgesia: The Need for Greater Integration of Psychosocial Interventions into Acute Pain Management
Despite significant advancements in anaesthesia and pain medicine, the treatment of postoperative pain remains suboptimal in many hospitals. It is estimated that approximately 30% of patients experience severe post operative pain impeding function, delaying recovery, and increasing patients’ risk of developing chronic postoperative pain. Opioid analgesia can be effective in reducing the severity of acute post-operative pain. However, an over-reliance on opioids can also interfere with functioning, delay recovery, and increase patients’ risk of developing chronic post-operative pain. For over 50 years, researchers have demonstrated that we can optimize pain management and reduce patients’ reliance on opioids by addressing psychological and social contributors to pain, including beliefs about pain, distress, and needs for informational, emotional, and social support. And yet, it is rare for acute pain services to routinely provide patients with access to psychosocial pain management. In this presentation, Associate Professor Ashton-James will remind us of the depth and breadth of evidence for the benefits of integrating psychosocial interventions into routine acute pain management, share her teams’ research into clinician-reported barriers to addressing social contributors to pain, and describe the development and pilot testing of a digitally delivered psychosocial intervention for pain management, designed specifically to circumvent many of the barriers to addressing psychosocial contributors to pain in the context of acute pain care.
