Abstract
Background: Most medical schools fail to provide adequate training of clinicians in the treatment of pain. Similarly, despite the fact that over 1/3 of Americans suffer from chronic pain, National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for pain represents only ~1 % of the NIH budget. These issues may dissuade students from pursing pain in their clinical and research careers. To address these gaps in training and funding, we argue that exposing students to pain science early in their careers, at the undergraduate level, may be an effective method to develop a pipeline for future pain clinicians and scientists. To highlight our argument, we will describe our recent successful implementation of a cross-disciplinary and community-engaged biomedical summer research program. The Pain Undergraduate Research Experience (PURE) summer program involved both off-site and on-site experiences to expose undergraduate students to the range of careers in the pain field from basic science to clinical practice. The objective of the 10-week long PURE program was to evaluate whether a combination of basic science research, clinical practice visits, and patient interactions would increase student understanding of and exposure to the underlying science of pain. Methods: A pre-post cohort study was used without a comparison group. Entry and exit surveys were used to evaluate students' perceptions about pain clinical practice and research, student interest in pain, and student confidence about communicating about pain and doing basic science pain research. Results: Students reported significant increases to a number of questions in the survey. Questions were scored on 5 point Likert scales and there was significant increases in student understanding of what life is like with chronic pain (2.6 vs 4.3 post survey), their confidence in explaining pain to a patient (2.8 vs 4.1) or researcher (2.8 vs 4), and their comfort with pain terminology(2.8 vs 3.9). Conclusions: With the PURE program, we wanted to entice top undergraduates to consider pain as a future area of study, practice, and/or research. We present a model that can be easily implemented at research universities throughout the United States.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 135 |
| Journal | BMC Medical Education |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - May 4 2016 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2016 Kolber et al.
Funding
The PURE program and fellows were supported, in part, by the Duquesne University Provost’s Interdisciplinary Research Consortia Grant to the Chronic Pain Research Consortium, the Duquesne Mylan School of Pharmacy, the Duquesne Bayer School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, Swarthmore College, and faculty NIH grants (R15AT008060 BJK KJT; R21DA039621 JMJ; R25OD016516 JAP; R15CA176496 Jane Cavanaugh). Exposure to pain research is not something that students typically receive during their undergraduate time. The PURE program had a positive impact on students understanding of pain and pain research and helped educate them on the diversity of research and work being conducted. Hands-on research provides motivation students to stay in STEM fields [24]. The PURE program likely enhances this effect through the clinical exposure that strengthens the student’s connection to their research. The focus on pain for the PURE program was driven by data showing increasing rates of pain [1] and poor post-graduate training in pain [12]. A analogous approach was used in the Summer Training in Aging Research Topics—In Mental Health (START-MH) program funded by the National Institute of Mental Health to encourage students to enter the field of geriatric psychiatry [25]. This program found that the model could be used to build a pipeline for geriatric medicine. An important difference between the PURE and the START-MH is that all students in the START-MH trained at different institutions in the United States. Having all of our PURE fellows at one institution allowed us to develop activities to improve student’s professional development (e.g. seminar on poster presentations) and deepen their clinical exposure (e.g. informal lunches with patients).
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Duquesne Bayer School of Natural and Environmental Sciences | |
| Duquesne Mylan School of Pharmacy | |
| Duquesne University Provost | |
| National Institutes of Health (NIH) | R15AT008060 BJK KJT, R25OD016516, R15CA176496 |
| National Institute of Mental Health | |
| National Institute on Drug Abuse | R21DA039621 |
| Swarthmore College |
Keywords
- Medical education
- Pain
- Undergraduate education
- Undergraduate medical education
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Education