Living With Pain: A Design Research Project with Chronic Pain Patients and Clinicians to Improve the Communication of Their Complex Pain Lived Experience.

Abstract

Chronic pain is a persistent pain that lasts over three months. Those who have chronic pain may have to go to various specialists, clinicians, and programs for their pain. Communicating multifaceted personal experiences, like chronic pain, is difficult. Chronic pain’s invisible nature makes it so that others cannot easily express or understand it. The problem of miscommunication then significantly affects health outcomes and patient-clinician relationships. This research explored the role of design to help make these conversations more effective through the development of objects to make experiences of pain more tangible. Making experiences ‘symbolic’ through objects was hoped to create room for discussion and support patients in better communicating their feelings. This may result in clinicians better understanding patients, who may, in turn, be able to understand their clinician better. Literature shows improved patient outcomes where there is a beneficial patient-clinician relationship.

Through The Auckland Regional Pain Service (TARPS), practising experts in chronic pain were recruited, along with those who have been in active chronic pain management and continue to live with chronic pain. Their involvement was supported using an action research framework to develop a design solution that meets the different needs of the participant groups.

The project demonstrated the complex nature of the chronic pain experience and how using design can assist in unpacking chronic pain. Furthermore, the creative methods used help show how design may help support New Zealand’s health system. The design of the individual objects and the supporting toolkit demonstrate the potential for physical resources to help facilitate conversations and the sharing of ideas that otherwise may not have happened.