Solicitation of Public Comments on Draft National Pain Strategy - The Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee (IPRC)

A core recommendation of the 2011 IOM Report: Relieving Pain in America  is:  "The Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services should develop a comprehensive, population health-level strategy for pain prevention, treatment, management, education, reimbursement, and research that includes specific goals, actions, time frames, and resources." The IOM report highlighted specific objectives for the strategy:
  • Describe how efforts across government agencies, including public–private partnerships, can be established, coordinated, and integrated to encourage population-focused research, education, communication, and community-wide approaches that can help reduce pain and its consequences and remediate disparities in the experience of pain among subgroups of Americans.
  • Include an agenda for developing physiological, clinical, behavioral, psychological, outcomes, and health services research and appropriate links across these domains.
  • Improve pain assessment and management programs within the service delivery and financing programs of the federal government.
  • Proceed in cooperation with the Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee and the National Institutes of Health's Pain Consortium and reach out to private-sector participants as appropriate.
  • Involve the appropriate agencies and entities.
  • Include ongoing efforts to enhance public awareness about the nature of chronic pain and the role of self-care in its management.

The Department of Health and Human Services charged the Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee (IPRCC) with creating a comprehensive population health-level strategy to begin addressing these objectives.

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National Pain Strategy: A Comprehensive Population Health-Level Strategy for Pain (draft)

http://iprcc.nih.gov/docs/DraftHHSNationalPainStrategy.pdf