We're keen to work closely with local services and find that some families benefit from a shared care model.
When we receive a referral form that meets the referral criteria, we'll discuss the referral in a multidisciplinary meeting before the virtual professionals triage clinic. Families do not attend this clinic.
This clinic is for the general paediatrician and referring professional (where this is not a paediatrician) to discuss the needs of the child and family with multidisciplinary representation from our service.
The clinic is online and runs monthly on a Tuesday morning. Consultations usually take 30 minutes with a short thinking break for the chronic pain team to discuss and agree recommendations and a plan to feedback to the referrer. The referrer then feeds back the outcome to the family.
After this meeting, we may:
- offer the family a physiotherapy-led triage clinic appointment
- ask the referring clinician to refer for input from other professionals such as social care, safeguarding teams, local emotional wellbeing services, other medical specialists, or further medical investigations before starting on the chronic pain pathway
- recommend that at the present time, the chronic pain service is not the right service for the young person. Where possible we aim to share recommendations for alternative approaches or signpost to other services