Pain Empowerment Program (PEP) referral for GPs & Health Professionals

Referral Guidelines

Indications for referral:

Consider referral when the patient has chronic/persistent pain and;

    1. Patient has been screened for red flags,
    2. Reasonable and accessible management in the primary care sector has been tried with insufficient success,
    3. Pain has significant impact on some aspects of life – sleep, self-care, mobility, work or school attendance, recreation, relationships and/or emotions.

Referrals are particularly encouraged when the patient has:

    • Complex psychosocial influences on pain behaviour requiring specialised assessment and care,
    • Current or past history of addiction or prescribed medication use that seem to be complicating current management e.g. An escalating opioid requirement.
    • Difficult to control neuropathic pain

PEP will require:

    • Completion of the attached referral form in full where possible.
    • Assessment by the PEP team to ensure suitability of the patient
    • Relevant approvals (eg; worksafe, SRA,  etc.)

The preference of PEP is:

    • To work actively in partnership with the GP in ongoing management
    • To work in close communication with other specialist services who are providing treatment for the same or related problem.
    • As PEP is an education based program, we prefer that your patient is prescribed less than 50mg equivalent morphine dosage. This is because learning can be compromised when the patient is ingesting a significant amount of opioid based pain relief.