2023-07-15 13:50:26
The federal government will provide a $1.7 million grant to the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) for its complex chronic pain plan.
The SHA works on programs to help people with chronic pain who are at risk or currently have opioid addiction or opioid use disorder due to medications they have taken to manage the pain. pain.
The federal money is part of a $20 million package to address the harms associated with substance use in British Columbia and the Prairies. This is the second grant SHA has received for its complex chronic pain plan, and it will cover the Saskatchewan plan through 2025.
The first grant, in the amount of $2.36 million, was awarded in 2019 and was used to establish the Regina Chronic Pain Clinic.
Offer more consultations in hospitals
The new funding from Ottawa will be used to expand opioid and pain counseling services in Regina hospitals. In addition, the SHA plans to create satellite chronic pain clinics in various cities in Saskatchewan, without however having a timetable at this time.
The goal is really to manage pain as best we can in the community, but also to reduce the inappropriate prescribing of opioids and improve people’s quality of life, said SHA’s acting chief executive, Sarah Johnson.
Although the Regina Chronic Pain Clinic has been able to help thousands of people since its inception, demand continues to outstrip supply. [de services]. There is still a lot of work to do, she said.
For her part, Dr. Radhika Marwah, who is a family physician in Regina, is pleased to see federal funding for the treatment of chronic pain.
She also cares for patients at the provincially funded USask Chronic Pain Clinic in Saskatoon and says doctors in the province have been waiting a very long time for the government to focus on the problem.
She explains that opioid addiction is often rooted in the management of chronic pain: It hasn’t been treated in the most appropriate way in the past, and so these are patients who have been neglected for a very long time.
She also insists that opioid addiction is not the fault of the patient, but of the drug: It is the drug that acts and disrupts their brain and central nervous system.
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