PEPR Symposium at Canadian Pain Society Annual Scientific Meeting

Our PEPR team recently attended the Canadian Pain Society’s 2024 Annual Scientific Meeting in Ottawa, Ontario. Here, we presented our symposium, entitled “Democratizing Participant Engagement of Marginalized Communities in Chronic Pain Research: Crafting a Way Forward.”

Team members Abhimanyu Sud and Desmond Williams facilitated the symposium. The speakers were PEPR director Fiona Webster, collaborator Paula Rowland, and postdoctoral fellow Leigha Comer.  

The panel aimed to  

• Shift focus from individuals to communities

• Highlight how the quality of research on chronic pain can be enhanced through a focus on health equity in policy and care

• Discuss the potential to reframe how certain conditions/diseases are normatively understood, leading to the democratization of research and health for the benefit of people living with chronic pain and marginalization

Fiona Webster’s talk, “Social science and community engagement approaches to PE” focused on the critical theories and sociological methodology that underpin PEPR’s approach to meaningful engagement in chronic pain research and why this is important.

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Paula Rowland shared a talk, “What is “the patient perspective” in patient engagement programs? Implicit logics and parallels to feminist theories.” One key highlight of this talk was “The patient perspective” as a particular kind of situated knowledge, specifically an embodied knowledge of vulnerability.

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Lastly, Leigha Comer’s talk, “An interpretive synthesis of PE frameworks” focused on the findings of an interpretive review conducted to identify what types of frameworks, guidelines, tools, and models exist to guide and support patient engagement.  

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The symposium was very well received, with about 40 people in attendance. We are grateful to the Canadian Pain Society and to everyone who contributed to this work.