New guide published on implementing Pain Cafes 

Health Innovation South West has published a new guide to implementing ‘Pain Cafes’ – an innovative, non-medical approach to help people self-manage pain in their community without unnecessary opioid medication.  

The guide offers learning, insights and tips to Integrated Care Boards, primary, community, and secondary care, and voluntary and charity sector organisations, interested in setting up pain cafes – a simple and inexpensive model that can support care within communities and reduce GP and hospital demand.   

Opioids are a highly effective class of medicines used to treat pain. However, in the case of chronic non-cancer pain, when the source of long-term pain doesn’t have a cause that can be treated, opioids can do more harm than good.  

Supporting people to self-manage their chronic pain at home can relieve people living in rural and coastal areas of long travel distances to access care, and therefore reduce demand on GP, community and secondary care services. 

In South West England, high levels of people in rural and coastal communities live with chronic non-cancer pain. Pain cafes were developed in Plymouth in 2023 by Chronic Pain Coaching CIC as a way to support the local community living in pain.  

These informal sessions offer non-medical pain management techniques and an opportunity to connect with peers who have similar experiences in a supportive, non-judgmental space. They are mainly run in person in community settings such as community halls or health hubs, or online to provide access to patients who are unable to attend due to rurality, timing, or mental or physical barriers.  

Over the past few years, a Pain Cafe model has been developed and spread across Cornwall by Imagine If. Across the border in Devon and Somerset, Health Innovation South West has supported its spread via its Medicine Safety Improvement Programme, and evaluation support to focus the scope of the pilot cafe and demonstrate impact.  

20 pain cafes are now running across Cornwall, with many others running across the South West, improving pain management for hundreds of people across the region. Read more about their impact. 

The new guide, Pain Cafe Implementation Toolkit: Learning from the implementation of pain cafes in South West England, sets out an approach to implementing pain cafés for systems and places, and provides practical insights to systems and places wishing to implement pain cafés, including information on:  

• Assessing local need 
• System collaboration 
• Funding  
• Ways of delivering pain cafes 
• Impact and data 

Access the guide here. 

Visit our webpage for more information about how Health Innovation South West has been supporting a whole-system approach to reduce harm from opioids for non-cancer patients.