A curated set of downloads and external links that help people manage persistent pain.
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High Commended: Medicines Safety Improvement Programme (MedSIP) HSJ Patient Safety Congress and Awards - September 2026
The Pain Café’s work with the National Medicines Safety Improvement Programme (MedSIP) and Health Innovation Southwest and West was rewarded as ‘Highly Commended’ at the HSJ Patient Safety Congress and Awards on 28th Sept 2026.
This is a psychological tool that helps recognise that you can change and train your brain and its neural pathways. Start by reading the words on the card e.g yellow, blue, orange etc. You can read these very easily because your brain is used to reading. Now read the colours of the words e.g. green red, blue etc. This will be more difficult and you will read them more slowly. Your brain is not used to doing this. You have ton concentrate more and challenge what your brain wants to automatically say. Importantly with practice you can change your brain pathways and read the colours of more quickly. You can change other pathways in the brain in the same way e.g. negative thoughts you have of yourself or beliefs about pain. This is also a great distraction exercise. Have a go.
Presentation to Congress of European Pain Federation, Lyon, April 2025 Pain Cafes
Connected by Pain presented the work of pain cafes to the Congress of European Pain Federation in Lyon, April 2025. We produced a poster outlining aims, activities and outcomes. Please see the attached poster.
The experience of chronic pain is different for everybody. We have our own unique pain fingerprint. Pain cafes offer the chance to share these different perspectives to help people understand each other, finding common ground and spaces where experience varies. We all want to learn to understand chronic pain more to support ourselves and to help our families and communities understand and better respond
