The Joint Pain Education Project (JPEP) is a collaborative effort between the Department of Defense (DOD) and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to develop a standardized pain management curriculum to improve the complex care needs of pain patients, specifically, obviously, designed for military personnel and veterans, as well as addressing provider education and training. The “project” was originally targeted for joint pain issues but has changed with time into a much broader task force to look at and address the problem of pain, chronic pain specifically.
The organization now offers quite a wealth of information for all individuals in the pain management community…
The Objectives of the JPEP are to:
*Standardize DoD/VHA education curriculum content, supporting materials, and a variety of commonly accessible” delivery” i.e. healthcare systems.
*Enhance pain care transition between the DoD and VA
*Commit to learning and training our providers, teams, centers, and agencies together; ultimately building a new model of pain care.
The JPEP web-site, which is now known as the Defense and Veteran’s Center for Integrative Pain Management, has a number of interesting resources all related to pain and pain management including videos, studies and research results and information, and a number of various publications including government reports and guidelines.
Pain Management Task Force Report was commissioned by the U.S. Army’s Surgeon General in 2009 to “provide recommendations for an Army Medical Command comprehensive pain management strategy that is holistic, multi disciplinary and multimodal in its approach, utilizes state of the art/science modalities and technologies and provides optimal quality of life for Soldiers and other patients with acute and chronic pain.”
The task force’s final report “contains 109 recommendations for a holistic, multidisciplinary and multimodal pain management strategy that utilizes state of the art/science modalities and technologies to address acute and chronic pain of soldiers and other patients”. It is lengthy, as you can imagine of a government report, but makes for interesting reading aka skimming and generally one is left with the impression that if, in fact, they could enact the ideas put forth they’d really have a very fine methodology for helping our armed forces providing optimal quality of life for soldiers and other patients dealing with pain.
This video looks at the JPEP’s six essentials to pain management.
Chronic Pain Daily Reflections 