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Residential rehab for CRPS
Sadly, there’s currently no cure for CRPS. However, there’s a wide variety of treatments and therapies available aimed at improving function and pain. Most people diagnosed with CRPS end up on a pain management programme. In most cases, programmes are on an outpatient basis and provided by local NHS hospital pain management departments. However, although competition for places is intense, residential rehab for CRPS is available.
What is a pain management programme?
Pain management programmes are multidisciplinary. That means that following an assessment, you receive input from health professionals in various disciplines, including a specialist pain doctor, a psychologist, a physiotherapist and/or an occupational therapist. Specialist nurse practitioners also play an important role in a pain management team.
In my experience, these outpatient programmes vary considerably in length, between five and twelve weeks. Usually, attendance is weekly, with significant emphasis on ‘homework’.
Residential pain management
No matter how diligent you are with your home exercises – physical and psychological – it makes sense that working intensively for several hours each day with those treating you, as opposed to just once a week, is more likely to result in a better outcome both in terms of pain and functionality. For that reason, a few residential pain management programmes have operated for many years, both within the NHS and privately.
Bath Centre for Pain Services
We are very fortunate indeed in my area to have one such programme on our doorstep. The Bath Centre for Pain Services (BCPS) now operates from bespoke premises on the same site in Bath as the Royal United Hospital. I was privileged to visit the centre during construction to view the amazing facilities taking shape. And I received an invitation to its official opening by the Duchess of Cornwall (as she then was).
The BCPS treats the full spectrum of chronic pain, providing programmes on both an outpatient and inpatient basis, including residential rehab for CRPS. Although an NHS Trust, they accept private patients to help fund their numerous services and facilities. Referrals are nationwide.
Over the years, many of our clients have attended their programmes privately and on the NHS. Indeed, we have had considerable success in persuading defendant insurance companies to meet the costs of residential programmes.
Residential rehab for CRPS: Crash and burn
However, experience has shown that while a residential programme’s intensive, multidisciplinary approach can produce incredible results, beware that danger lurks around the corner.
Residential courses necessarily cocoon you within a highly supportive, almost rarefied, treatment environment for the course’s two, three, or four-week duration. However, on discharge, you return to your real world, risking what I refer to as the ‘crash and burn’ factor.
Residential rehabilitation provides you with the best opportunity to focus entirely on yourself and your rehabilitation for the duration of the course. For the very best of reasons, you gently push family, friends, and all the myriad distractions of daily life to one side for a limited period.
You may have travelled a significant distance to attend the course, and whilst you have an emergency point of contact should problems arise following your discharge, it’s often three months before your first follow-up appointment with the treatment team. Overnight, helpful and supportive staff are no longer on tap. Family and friends are keen to talk and catch up. There’s a month’s worth of stored-up domestic and other issues. And even if you can focus on the daily regime of physical and psychological exercises that have been drummed into you, they suddenly seem less effective. Very quickly, the ‘end of rehab high’ upon which you floated home has evaporated, and you begin to spiral down.
Advance planning
Therefore, to help minimise the risk of ‘crash and burn’, we always work with clients to ensure continued local, professional support is already in place before you attend an inpatient programme. These local professionals will have assessed you before the course. So on your return home, you are ready to ‘hit the ground running’.
Your local treatment providers are put in contact with the course providers for information sharing. Notifying your general practitioner of the course is essential, particularly from a medication perspective. Although course providers write to your GP, correspondence is often delayed. If possible, advance appointments are arranged with treatment providers for the first few days following the course.
Just taking these simple steps can make a massive difference to the long-term success of your inpatient treatment.