A Dyadic Pain Management Program for Community-Dwelling Older Adults with Chronic Pain: Study Protocol for a Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial

Abstract

Community-dwelling older adults suffer from chronic pain. Pain negatively affects their physical and psychosocial wellbeing. The majority of pain management education and programs focus only on older adults. Their informal caregivers should be involved in pain management. A dyadic pain management program for reducing pain and psychological health symptoms, and improving pain self-efficacy, quality of life, and physical function in older adults is proposed for evaluation of its effectiveness. This will be a cluster randomized controlled trial. Community-dwelling older adults aged 60 or above and their informal caregivers will be recruited. The dyadic pain management program will be an eight-week group-based program. The participants in the experimental group will receive four weeks of center-based, face-to-face activities and four weeks of digital-based activities via a WhatsApp group. The control group will receive the usual care and a pain management pamphlet. Data will be collected at baseline, and at the eighth-week and sixteenth-week follow-up session. The outcome measurements will include pain intensity, pain self-efficacy, perceived quality of life, depression, anxiety, and stress levels. Data on the caregiver burden will be collected from the informal caregivers. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, all social activities have been suspended. In the near future, as the pandemic subsides, the dyadic pain management program will be launched to benefit community-dwelling older adults and informal caregivers and to reduce their pain and the care burden, respectively.