***The Cochrane PaPaS Group closes on 31 March 2023 and this website will be archived; please contact support@cochrane.org with any questions***

About our event

Pain in clinical practice and patient care is often poorly served by an evidence architecture containing multiple structural weaknesses. These issues span across pre-clinical research, clinical trials, and systematic reviews, and impact upon the development of clinical guidelines. Clinical practice in pain management frequently diverges from the evidence, or evolves in the absence of evidence, driven by individual and organisational vested interests, market forces, fashion, and demand from people with pain.

At the Cochrane Pain, Palliative and Supportive Care group (PaPaS), we have been delivering the gold standard in evidence synthesis in the field of pain management and supporting the pain community towards better methods and standards in pain clinical trials and systematic reviews for 23 years.

We invited people to join us to reflect on what has been discovered, where we continue to face important challenges and how we might move toward a future of trusted evidence to guide better pain care globally.

In this event we heard from a range of established and emerging leaders in the field to better understand the challenges and to consider how we create better solutions. We encouraged participants to come ready to reflect and actively contribute to the conversation.

This event took place on the 7th December 2022 in London. There's an update about it in our latest newsletter here: Latest newsletter: PaPaS (mailchi.mp)

Click below to listen to the videos from this event:

The videos from this event are now available on the Cochrane YouTube channel: 

Truth, Integrity and the Future of Pain Evidence | Cochrane

Sharing information for the event

The hashtag for the event was #PaPaSPain2022 - do take a look on Twitter to see how the day went!

The Agenda for the day

AM SESSION - Establishing the challenges 

Buffet lunch 

PM SESSION. Moving towards solutions and building trust 

Speakers on the day

We've got a wonderful agenda lined up for you all, please meet our speakers:

Professor Andrew Moore

Talk title: 23 years of PaPaS. What did we learn about reliable pain evidence?

Bio: Andrew Moore studied at Balliol College, Oxford, as a biochemist, and has worked in the NHS, in industry, and in academia. He was the founding editor of the EBM bulletin Bandolier. He has worked in pain research for over 40 years, and worked with PaPaS in an editorial capacity since its founding.

Andrew’s main research interests involve methods of systematic review, meta-analysis, and clinical trials, and how to represent the results of clinical research for best use in clinical practice. He is the author of several books on pain and EBM, over 700 scientific papers, including over 100 Cochrane reviews.

Professor Eija Kalso

Talk title:  Evidence-based management of pain - the way forward?

Bio: Eija Kalso, MD, DMedSci, graduated from the Medical Faculty of the University of Helsinki where she also defended her doctoral thesis. She is a specialist in anaesthesiology and has a special competence in pain medicine. She continues to work at the Helsinki University Hospital with a main affiliation at the University of Helsinki, Dept. of Pharmacology and SleepWell Research Programme. She has been full professor in Pain Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine since 2004. She served as vice dean for the faculty in 2010-2013. She was elected to the Finnish Academy of Sciences in 2010 and to the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters in 2017.

Eija Kalso has spent two most fruitful postdoctoral years at the University of Oxford and worked first as a clinical lecturer and later as visiting professor at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden.

Eija Kalso is the founding president of The Finnish Association for the Study of Pain and a former president of the Scandinavian Association for the Study of Pain which was replaced by the national Scandinavian IASP chapters. She has served in several committees and in the Council and Executive Committee of IASP, the president of which she was in 2010-2012.

Eija Kalso has also served in the editorial boards of the European Journal of Pain, PAIN, Scandinavian Journal of Pain.

The main research interest of Eija Kalso include both basic and clinical pharmacology of pain, evidence-based medicine, multidisciplinary pain medicine, genetics of pain and recently also the role of sleep in pain.

Dr Neil O’Connell

Talk title: From Bias to Trustworthiness in pain research

Bio: Dr. Neil O'Connell is a Reader at Brunel University, London, UK. He divides his time between research and teaching and previously worked as a musculoskeletal physiotherapist. Neil is the Co-ordinating Editor of Cochrane's Pain, Palliative, and Supportive Care (PaPaS) group and was a member of the Guideline Development Group for the UK's National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) 2016 guideline for the management of low back pain and sciatica and contributed to the NICE Quality Standard on that topic.

Dr Nadia Soliman

Talk title: Quality and integrity in pre-clinical pain research, what have we learned from systematic reviews?

Bio: Nadia Soliman’s research is focused on evidence synthesis methods to improve forward and backward translation from animal trials to clinical trials. She is developing methods, including machine technologies and crowd science, to improve the feasibility, efficiency and accuracy of preclinical systematic reviews while addressing neurobiological questions of interest to improve the predictive validity of animal research.  Her focus is to ensure that research conduct is rigorous, open, and transparent.  

Dr Georgia Richards

Talk titles:

• Surveillance and safety of pain medicines in the real world?
• Opening up pain science

Bio: Georgia is a Health Scientist and Epidemiologist working across academia, publishing, and industry. She completed a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil/PhD) that investigated the global and national use of opioids at the University of Oxford, working with real world data and patients to reduce harm and improve patient safety. Georgia is the Medical Teaching and Development Lead in the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, coordinating and teaching Oxford University Medical students, supervising research projects, MSc and DPhil theses, and is an Associate Editor for BMJ Evidence Based Medicine. She is also an independent contractor, fulfilling a contract as a Senior Pharmacoepidemiologist in the Global Patient Safety Team at AstraZeneca. Georgia is a member of OPeRA, The Open Pain Research Advocacy and Appraisal Group, which is a collection of early-career researchers, academics, and clinicians working collaboratively to improve the transparency and openness of pain research.

Professor Rachael Gooberman-Hill

Talk title: Working across disciplines in pain research

Bio: Rachael Gooberman-Hill is Director of the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute for Health Research and Professor of Health and Anthropology at the University of Bristol. Rachael's disciplinary background is Social Anthropology, and she leads interdisciplinary research that aims to make a difference to people living with long-term and painful conditions, including pain after surgery. Rachael is also a member of the Development Board of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Science and Health, and she is co-chair of the new UK Committee on Research Integrity. At the event Rachael is speaking in her capacity as Professor of Health and Anthropology. 

Mr Colin Wilkinson

Talk title: "Starting where the other person is - Involvement, Trust and the Essence of Success in Research"

Bio: Colin Wilkinson is co-chair of Versus Arthritis' Fellowship Expert Committee, and was involved in writing their Research Roadmap for Pain which led to the Advanced Pain Discovery Platform being established. Colin is chair of the network of public contributors involved in the Consortium to Research Individual, Interpersonal and Social Influences of Pain, led by the University of Bath and funded by the APDP. Colin was also a member of the NICE Guideline Committee for Chronic Pain and has been a part of four other NICE guidelines. His career was as a science communicator, working mainly in schools. This came to an end following a clinical negligence incident in 2018, since when he has focused on being a public contributor to health research and policy. Colin has lived with chronic pain since age 18 - almost 30 years.

Dr Dominic Aldington

Talk title: Using evidence in practice: the successes and the challenges

Bio: Dominic Aldington is a full time Consultant in Pain Medicine in the Hampshire Hospitals NHS Trust. He previously worked in Oxford and spent time with the team in the Pain Research Unit where he was able to participate in some of their Cochrane publications. Before that he served as a Consultant Anaesthetist and Pain Physician in the British Army.