Full mindfulness-teacher training pathway and courses on pain management programmes: why it may all be worth it

Pain Management Programmes (PMPs). PMPs are the gold standard biopsychosocial treatment for persistent pain as advocated by international specialist MDT pain research and the British Pain Society (BPS). There is a growing appetite for the provision of mindfulness training in order for staff to deliver mindfulness teaching on multidisciplianry (MDT) Within this context, there is also an ongoing debate around what should be the minimum required standards
for training pain management staff to teach mindfulness. In addition, the most recent guidance on chronic primary pain from the National Institue for Health and Care Excellence (NICE, 2021), recommendations for more research into both the clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of mindfulness.
In this article, we will share our experience from our ongoing audit of clinical outcomes of having various members of our multidisciplinary team (MDT) trained in the necessary competences to provide full 8-week mindfulness courses within a multidisciplinary secondary outpatient pain management and rehabilitation service, likely constituting the largest data sample available at the time, for mindfulness in pain services, in the UK. We also reflect on how we have grown
to align to these high standards of training for PMP staff wishing to teach mindfulness, effectively making recommendations to colleagues across the UK via this clinical news publication governance principles of quality, safety,efficiency and reputation. In this article, we make a case against diluting, duplicating or important standards in this area. As such, we will start by giving a background on our service that may assist other similar services to consider these standards, including costings from our initial pilot, as well as our continuous-sample data, including subjective patient feedback and psychometric data. We then move on to describing our reasoning for choosing to invest in mindfulness-courses, when the evidence base is still developing, before touching upon the issues and complexities around competencies that are still yet to be addressed and resolved. We conclude with added reflections and our vision going forward.