First EFIC® Symposium Societal Impact of Pain - SIP

Ken Paterson
Prof. Ken Paterson
Chair – Scottish Medicines Consortium
Are We Adequately Equipped to Assess
Pain Therapies?
Assessment of the comparative effectiveness
and cost-effectiveness of healthcare
interventions is increasingly being undertaken
as the funds available to provide healthcare are
increasingly stretched. New therapies in the
field of pain are subject to such assessment
and frequently fail to demonstrate that the
clinical benefits they bring justify the required
expenditure. This may reflect limitations in
the therapies, but could also highlight
issues with the assessment parameters and
methodologies.
Given that the symptom of pain is widely feared
and has many negative impacts on quality of life
it is surprising that pain therapies have failed
to show cost-effectiveness. It is possible that
limiting the perspective of health economic
assessment to the view of the healthcare
payer misses out on substantial benefits of
therapy, while the absence of prolongation of
survival due to the use of purely symptomatic
therapy may also limit the potential to show
benefit. Some quality of life assessment tools
may inadequately capture the benefit of pain
relief, especially if this benefit is largely
psychological and does not translate into
improvements in day-to-day physical activity.
Is pain a special case in terms of health
technology assessment …. and if so why, and
what can we do differently? Do we need new
tools, or do those developing and assessing
pain therapies need to make better use of tools
already at our disposal?
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