We’ve had another big year at Flippin’ Pain: 2024 was filled with a lot of firsts for the team, helping us to expand our reach in new and exciting ways!
Our primary focus this year has been on professional training, supporting teams of all kinds. This year we’ve visited more areas of the UK than ever before: it has been great to meet 990 passionate, hard-working people across Lincolnshire, Kirklees, South Yorkshire, Gateshead, Newcastle, London, Middlesbrough, Bedfordshire and Cumbria!
Less than 1% of training for many health and social care disciplines is specific to pain (and not just persistent pain). This is why what our amazing Community Pain Champions do is so important: 73% of everyone who joined us for training this year left feeling ‘mostly’ or ‘always’ confident in supporting people in managing their pain.
We’re always looking to make our training engaging, thought provoking and memorable: this is why we’ve tested different formats this year, including the ‘Pain in the Spotlight’ events designed in partnership with Professor Lorimer Moseley AO. These quirky evening sessions in a comedy-club setting invited discussion and participation in ways we’d never tried before: who would have thought Play Your Cards Right and Family Fortunes could be so useful for pain education?
We’ve also piloted our first awareness campaign this year, again directed at professionals. ‘Pain Education? Good Move!’ is all about highlighting how pain might be preventing people from getting active. We’ve worked with Active Cumbria to get the campaign up and running, and hope to be able to spread the word further in 2025.
Flippin’ Pain had an international stage last October, when Professor Cormac Ryan presented at Brussels in front of over 80 researchers, clinicians, lived experience experts and Members of the European Parliament. It has been great to be part of something at this scale: and though big changes can often take time, we can’t wait to see where this conversation leads.
Since March 2024, we’ve also been ‘award winning’! Flippin’ Pain won Gold at the HSJ Partnership Awards for our work with our partners up in Tees Valley. We also won a Bright Ideas in Health Award in November, for all of the professional education work we’ve mentioned above. These awards are both honours to receive, and we couldn’t be happier with the result.
Finally, Flippin’ Pain has been working on something new: a digital platform called ‘Why We Hurt’. It has taken a full year to make and we’re very proud of it!
This platform will be free to areas that commission us, and will help anyone living with persistent pain to understand how pain works and how they can move closer to recovery. We’re currently testing it out with the help of a few ‘guinea pigs’, with ‘Why We Hurt’ going live to the first areas in early 2025. Watch this space!
We feel very lucky to have such a great community around us, who support us to try new things and grow. Thank you to everyone for another great year: we can’t wait to see what 2025 brings!
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