Associate Professor Ben Darlow
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Musculoskeletal Physiotherapy Specialist, Otago University, Wellington, NZ
Ben Darlow is a musculoskeletal physiotherapy specialist practising in Wellington and an Associate Professor in the Department of Primary Health Care and General Practice at the University of Otago Wellington. Ben’s key research interests are the assessment and measurement of health beliefs about common musculoskeletal conditions, understanding how these beliefs have been influenced and the impact that these have on well-being, and designing, testing, and implementing interventions to improve knowledge, health care delivery, and outcomes. Ben has also led research exploring interprofessional education and review of the Otago Medical School pain curriculum.
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Explaining Osteoarthritis to Empower Participation
Participation can be empowered through a clinician-patient partnership that prioritises the needs and preferences of the patient, recognises the patient's strengths, priorities, opportunities, and potential, and supports achievement of their goals in a manner consistent with their values. The KneeCAPS study trained dietitians, pharmacists, and physiotherapists to empower people with knee osteoarthritis to improve their health and participate in their communities. Online training modules integrated concepts of cultural safety, health literacy, osteoarthritis knowledge and beliefs, empowering communication, interprofessional practice, and behaviour change support. Clinicians rated the training modules highly and reflected that these supported them to develop key aspects of their practice. Clinicians described strengthening their ability to from connections with patients, consider the importance of all aspects of health, understand and use tools to explore and reflect on their biases, use models and resources to explain osteoarthritis in ways that are meaningful to patients and consistent across interprofessional practice, empower self-determination, and develop patients’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to achieve their goals. Clinicians felt able to apply these learnings more widely to patients with other pain conditions.
Preparing Medical Students to Care for People in Pain: Reviewing and Updating the Otago Medical School Pain Curriculum
It is essential that medical graduates have a modern understanding of pain that enables them to provide high value, evidence-based, and person -centred health care for acute and persistent pain. However, pain teaching is often not well documented in medical school curricula and the Otago MBChB (medical) pain curriculum had not previously been formally reviewed. A cross-campus, interdisciplinary working group reviewed pain learning and existing content, and developed a comprehensive and integrated pain curriculum that consolidated contemporary delivery of pain learning across the Otago MBChB degree. The working group recommended that two existing pain learning outcomes remained unchanged, six existing outcomes were modified or merged, and 26 new learning outcomes were adopted. The 33 pain learning outcomes were structured within the domains of: i) science, research, and scholarship (n=5); ii) population health and epidemiology (n=3); iii) clinical skills (n=5); and iv) diagnostics and therapeutics (n=20). The recommendations were accepted by the MBChB Curriculum Committee and included in the 2023 Curriculum Map (https://medmap.otago.ac.nz/ui/browse/domains/81?expand=1663,1664,1670). This project demonstrates that pain curriculum change is possible but requires cross-institution support from curriculum leaders, teachers, and students. Wide collaboration is required to ensure that all stakeholders support the process and outcome. Ongoing work is required to support implementation.
