Pain Medicine
Chronic pain remains and increasingly growing problem for the Canadians and Canadian healthcare. We believe that novel strategies must be attempted in order to bridge the shortcomings currently existing the way we deliver care to our chronic pain patients in the community.
One of our strategies has been to employ a mobile interdisciplinary chronic pain clinic. This mobile clinic has become a regular resource for many primary care providers to help increase their capacity to manage chronic pain in the Greater Toronto region. This model could be expanded and scaled to other areas in Ontario and perhaps other provinces.
The aim of this clinic is to alleviate prolonged wait times by providing mobile services and simultaneously empower family physicians to confidently manage chronic pain in an outpatient setting by providing them with tools and education.
We are proud to announce a formal one-year Primary Care Access Fellowship through the University of Toronto, for primary care physicians to take on the mobile clinic work. With an annual commitment of $75,000 to support the fellowship, these primary care physicians will enable other primary care community physicians to increase capacity and confidence in managing certain chronic pain conditions as well as managing ongoing care after discharge from a provincially funded academic pain clinic. The Primary Care Access Fellowship will allow knowledge dissemination about chronic pain from academic institutions into community practices and can even expand into underserviced remote location, primary practices.
Dr. Tania DiRenna is the Medical Director of the Toronto Academic Pain Medicine Institute (TAPMI), launched in 2017.
TAPMI is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary academic pain program serving as the hub for chronic pain care in Toronto. We invite you visit their website for more information !
Pain Medicine Subspecialty Residency Program
The Pain Medicine Subspeciatly Residency program at the Univesity of Toronto is supporting efforts to improve access to high quality pain care in rural Canada by inviting residents in the Family Anesthesia Practice program to practicpate in a national bootcamp called “Pain Medicine National Ground School“.
This year the 2-day event was completely virtual and learners joined from across Canada. Learners participated in didactic and case-based learning sessions in core areas of pain medicine that help strengthen the principles of multidisciplinary pain medicine. We hope the FPA trainees can use these skills and knowledge when they work in rural areas. Below is a picutre of some of our participants.
The residency program is under the leadership of Dr. John Hanlon as the Program Director. We invite you visit the Pain Medicine Residency program page for more information or email residency.painmedicine@utoronto.ca.
