An Interprofessional Consensus of Core Competencies for Prelicensure Education in Pain Management: Curriculum Application for Physical Therapy

Core competencies in pain management for prelicensure health professional education were recently established.1 These competencies represent the expectation of minimal capabilities for graduating health care students for pain management and include 4 domains: multidimensional nature of pain, pain assessment and measurement, management of pain, and context of pain (Appendix 1). The purpose of this article is to advocate for and identify how core competencies for pain can be applied to the professional (entry-level) physical therapist curriculum. By ensuring that core competencies in pain management are embedded within the foundation of physical therapist education, physical therapists will have the core knowledge necessary for offering best care for patients, and the profession of physical therapy will continue to stand with all health professions engaged in comprehensive pain management.One hundred million adults in America have chronic pain.2 This statistic is greater than the number of individuals affected by diabetes, cancer, and heart disease combined.2,3 Chronic pain management costs the United States more than $600 billion per year in health care costs and lost wages2 and creates major human and economic costs for patients, families, and society.1 Inadequate treatment or mismanagement of pain can cause delays in healing as well as long-lasting changes to the peripheral and central nervous systems.4 The Institute of Medicine published a report on pain in 2011 that highlighted it as a national challenge and recognized the need for a cultural transformation to effectively prevent, assess, treat, and understand pain of all types.2 This report addressed the deficit in pain education across all professions and promoted the inclusion of standardized information about pain within an “interprofessional setting.”2 Specific to physical therapy, a faculty survey of accredited physical therapist education programs in North America revealed 4 hours of pain education …