Patient expectations for a multimodal pain rehabilitation programme: active participation and coping skills. A qualitative study

Abstract

Purpose: To describe what patients with chronic pain expect from a multimodal pain rehabilitation programme.

Material and method: Qualitative interviews were used to uncover expectations about a multimodal rehabilitation programme offered at the Pain and Rehabilitations Centre, The University Hospital; Linköping, Sweden. Sixteen women and two men (mean age 37 years; standard deviation 10 years) with chronic benign pain participated. The interviews were analysed using qualitative content analyses.

Results: To participate actively in the multimodal pain rehabilitation programme and to learn adequate coping strategies to improve daily life emerged as a main category. It was based on the following four categories comprising expectations about: participating actively in the programme, interacting with the professionals and fellow patients, cognitive effects of the programme and tools for coping, and explicit effects from the programme.

Conclusions: Many patients expressed expectations which may reflect that the information before the programme had started rehabilitation process at the time point for this study. The results could be applied in rehabilitation programmes by acknowledging expectations to interact with professional team members and fellow patients, by early addressing of positive and negative expectations about the future pain and by incorporating and strengthen expectations of learning to cope with pain.

Implications for Rehabilitation

• Patients' expectations to interact with professional team members and fellow patients by participating actively in the pain rehabilitation programme should be acknowledged in each rehabilitation situation.

• Patients expressed both positive and negative expectations about their future pain situation and these expectations should be addressed as early as possible in the rehabilitation screening process.

• Patients' expectations of learning to cope with pain should be incorporated and strengthened in multimodal pain rehabilitation programmes.

Keywords:

• Active participation
• chronic pain
• coping
• expectations
• interacting
• multimodal pain programme

Declaration of interest

The authors report no declarations of interest.

The present study was supported by grants from the Vårdal Foundation (RehSam RS2011/002). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.