Around four million older people across the UK live with varying degrees of chronic pain as a result of conditions including arthritis, diabetes or frailty.
But while some people benefit from being prescribed analgesic medicines for pain relief, many end up receiving long-term repeated prescriptions - for medications ranging from paracetamol and ibuprofen, to opioids and antidepressants - for weeks, months or years at a time.
A new study will explore chronic pain prescribing in older adults around the UK, with the aim of highlighting the extent of the population impacted and whether current treatments and processes meet their overall needs.
The HOPE-AO project will investigate whether certain groups of the older population are prone to overprescribing and any side effects or other harms these medications can pose if taken for long periods.
It also aims to identify alternative treatment solutions to reduce the use of unnecessary analgesic pain medicines, working with patients to develop a list of acceptable strategies that could be tested and implemented across the UK.
The project is being led by researchers from the University of Plymouth, working with colleagues at the University of Exeter, Aston University, University of Aberdeen, and the North East London Foundation NHS Trust. It is funded by through a Programme Development Grant from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).
The project team comprises experts in the care of older people - including healthcare researchers, nurses, consultants, GPs, pharmacists and psychiatrists working across the UK - as well as medical statisticians and health economists. It also involves an advisory group of patients with lived experience of receiving repeat prescriptions for pain medication.
During the project, the team will speak to patients aged 65 and over with a history of chronic pain for which they are taking, or have taken, analgesic medication, and families who cared for and supported relatives with chronic pain.
They will also engage healthcare professionals who are either prescribing or supporting older adults taking analgesic medication for chronic pain management.
Alongside this work, the team will conduct a wide-ranging statistical analysis of anonymised healthcare data, to understand more about older adults who are prescribed medication for chronic pain. This includes patterns in prescribing, health and demographic factors associated with pain medication use, and potential health outcomes, and will help identify those likely to benefit most from support.
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