BGM Advocating for the role of OT in Pain Care

Themed around advocating for the role of OT in pain care, the BGM programme includes a presentation by international guest speaker, Bronnie Lennox Thompson, and a panel discussion and Q&A with our outgoing EXCO - Helen Roome, Linda Hiemstra and Gill Coetsee.

Bronnie Lennox Thompson (PhD), is a world-renowned OT and the Academic Director of Postgraduate Programmes in Pain & Pain Management at the University of Otago, Christchurch, New Zealand. She is the author of the long-running blog Healthskills.wordpress.com, and has authored six book chapters on chronic pain management. She holds a psychology Master's and PhD in chronic pain and has worked in this field most of her career. 

Bronnie will be presenting on "Contextualising Pain Management: Ensuring what's learned IN the clinic makes it INTO daily life" 

What's our goal with pain management and rehabilitation? What does daily life look like for the people we hope to help? How does what we do translate into the varied worlds of our patients? This talk will discuss the major limits of current approaches to pain management, and the need for ecological validity and embodiment in our therapeutic interventions. It will introduce a meta-model for occupational therapy for pain management drawn from evolutionary theory, and discuss occupational therapy practice points to support flexible long-term adaptive responses to life with chronic pain.