(628) Concept Curriculum on Pain for Medical Undergraduates Developed by CATCHUM: A Consortium of Texas Medical Schools

Authors: Hui‐Ming Chang, UT Houston Medical School; Trevor M Burt, UTMB; Brandi Dyer, UTMB; Michael Fitzpatrick, UT Southwestern Medical School; Martin Grabois, Baylor College of Medicine; C Stratton Hill, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center; Jim Hurley, Texas Cancer Council; Thomas Kimbrough, UTMB; Kelly Knape, UT Health Sciences Center at San Antonio; Marcia Levetown, UTMB; Leland Lou, Texas Tech Health Sciences Center; Keller Matthews, Texas A&M School of Medicine; Billy U Philips Jr., UTMB; P. Prithvi Raji, Texas Tech Health Sciences Center; C Rick Robertson, Texas A&M School of Medicine; Cindy Spears, CATCHUM Project; Jenny Young Tribble, TMA/POEP; Amy Valley, UT San Antonio Medical School Pain is a common symptom in many diseases. Current medical education addresses pain as a symptom that will lead to diagnosis rather than a symptom that will require treatments. Pain is often inadequately treated, especially in cancer patients. There is evidence that undertreatment of pain is a result of inadequate medical education. A robust educational effort, based on a comprehensive curriculum, is perhaps the only hope that society has of receiving state‐of‐the‐art care in pain management. In 1995, the Texas legislature passed Senate Bill 1454, which requires each medical school in Texas to report on content and extent of undergraduate education on pain medicine. Analysis of this pain treatment survey indicated that pain education is not a required course in any Texas medical schools. Pain medicine is taught in relation to other subject matters and comprises an average of 7.5 percent of the medical schools' 4‐year curriculum hours. A more integrative educational effort with an updated comprehensive curriculum is needed to address the current practice needs. This analysis led to the formation of the Pain Treatment Education Task Force of the CATCHUM Project (Cancer Teaching and Curriculum Enhancement in Undergraduate Medicine), a consortium of the Texas Medical Schools dedicated to educating undergraduate medical students about cancer prevention. The CATCHUM Project is supported by a grant from the National Cancer Institute. The Pain Treatment Education Task Force is comprised of pain experts from each Texas Medical School who represent the major disciplines of medicine concerned with pain. During the past 2 years, the Task Force established the first edition of the Concept Curriculum on Pain for Medical Undergraduates. The content of this curriculum include Preface, Introduction & Overview, Definition of Pain, Ethical Issues, Medical, Legal & Regulatory Policy, Biological Sciences, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Classification of Pain Syndromes, Clinical Evaluation, Management, Outcome Measures. Each session of the content is uniformly formatted into Goal, Content/Concepts, Learning Format, Instructional Resources, and Faculty Needs. Tasks for the future include disseminating and implementing the curriculum into the medical schools and assessing the progress in curricular changes and the outcomes of these educational efforts.