Using pain science education to help patients having total knee replacement surgery

About 1 in 5 patients who have a total knee replacement have chronic pain after their surgery. We need to find new ways to prevent this pain, to improve care for patients.

Pain science education is a way of helping patients better understand what causes pain and reduce unhelpful thoughts about their pain. Its aim is to help patients understand that pain is their body’s response to a real or perceived danger and not an indication that whatever they are doing is causing damage. This can help patients feel able to be more active, which can help reduce their pain in the long term.

Project aims

The aim of this project is to develop a new pain science education programme for patients having a total knee replacement, and test the feasibility of a clinical trial of the programme.

The study is being led by the University of South Australia and will run at 2 hospitals – 1 private and 1 public – in Australia.

We will develop the pain science education programme in workshops with health professionals and patients. We will focus on making the content and delivery of the programme accessible and inclusive for all patients.

We will then test it on a group of 60 patients to find out if it is acceptable to patients and healthcare professionals, and whether a future clinical trial would be feasible. Half of the patients will receive the pain science education programme and half will receive the usual care. We will gather information from them 8 weeks, 3 months and 6 months after their surgery.

What we hope to achieve

By the end of the project, we hope to have a pain science education programme for patients having a total knee replacement, ready to test in a large clinical trial. Our long-term goal is to reduce the chronic pain many patients experience after total knee replacement.