LAY SUMMARY At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and its challenges, there was a lack of accessible health care, including chronic pain management. In hopes of providing care for patients who sought treatment, many services shifted to virtual care, which was still accessible despite the pandemic. Although the problem of accessibility was solved, the effectiveness of a virtual chronic pain management program compared with an established in-person program that has historically provided results needed to be evaluated. This research looked to answer the question of a newly established virtual program’s effectiveness by measuring various pain-related variables in patients who completed the program. No differences were found between the results of a sample of patients who completed the program virtually and the results of those who completed the program in person. This study aligns with new research in the field of virtual chronic pain management. Results show that the virtual program is effective and accessible because of the nature of online care. Moving forward, virtual therapy can be effective in treating chronic pain and may potentially be a key tool in the future of clinical care overall.
Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated alternate modes of delivery of chronic pain management programs. The aim of this retrospective observational study was to examine the outcomes of virtual and in-person programs during the pandemic. Methods: Data were collected from the five-week intensive interdisciplinary pain management program (adapted for the pandemic) at the Michael G. DeGroote Pain Clinic, Hamilton, Ontario (N = 99; 66% virtual). Participants completed psychometric measures of pain intensity, pain disability, kinesiophobia, anxiety, depression, catastrophizing, sensitivity to pain traumatization, pain stages of change, pain acceptance, likelihood estimates of return to work and subjective happiness scales at admission and discharge, and self-evaluations of program benefit and satisfaction at discharge. A 2 × 2 mixed analysis of variance (ANOVA) on outcomes and between-groups ANOVAs on satisfaction measures were conducted. Results: Both programs produced highly significant outcomes with medium to large effect sizes for all measures (except the contemplation stage of change; p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.09–0.580) at discharge with no differences between them. No differences between program delivery modes were obtained with regard to the satisfaction measures ( p > 0.05) either. Bonferroni correction was applied to the analysis. Discussion: Results show that virtual delivery of chronic pain management is just as effective as in-person delivery. Previous findings on the benefits of interdisciplinary chronic pain management are replicated. Results point to the need to have both programs available for patients to promote benefit for all patients.