Live well with pain: reach for the stars

As anyone living with pain knows, pain doesn’t only have a physical impact. It affects your mood, it disrupts sleep patterns and daily activities. It impacts on your family and friendships and your ability to work. In other words pain affects every aspect of your life. While it may be true that persistent pain can’t be cured, there are many other parts of your life where changes can be made. As someone living with pain has put it: “self-management is about shrinking the part of your life that is about pain, and growing the other parts of your life, so that pain no longer dominates.” Learning to self-manage your pain takes time. It will mean learning new skills. So it’s often better to get help and support. GPs, physiotherapists, pharmacists and a whole range of other practitioners can guide you. This gives them a range of tools and techniques to support people like you to become a confident self-manager of your pain. Live Well with Pain’s resources offer tried, tested, and effective ways to develop your confidence to self-manage your pain. And everything is completely free to use, whether you are a person living with persistent pain, a carer, or a health care professional supporting people to develop their self -management skills.

The LWWP website is the most accessed site in the UK for knowledge and support into self-managing persistent Pain. It is promoted by NICE and the wonderful LWWP pain Team delivers a PCI-accredited AHSN-award winning Training programme. The LWWP 10-Footsteps Training programme is rolling out all over the UK, and has trained >500 persons living with persistent pain, carers, and a wide range of health care professional to date, with many more to follow in the coming months (https://livewellwithpain.co.uk/ten-footsteps-programme/)