We are working on a review focused on the experiences of health and social care professionals in the United Kingdom and other high-income countries regarding the assessment and management of chronic non-cancer pain in children. What progress has been made with the review? Our review team have been extremely busy getting our review on the Experiences, perceptions and attitudes of health and social care professionals to management of children’s chronic non-cancer pain ready for publication. We are delighted to let you know that we have completed the first stage in the publication process and we have submitted our review to an academic journal. We are now waiting to hear if it will be accepted – we will keep you posted! This type of review is called qualitative evidence synthesis. If you are interested in how we carried out this type of review keep reading! What did we do? We searched six different databases that include research studies. We wanted to find studies that captured health and social care professionals’ experiences of managing children’s chronic pain via interviews, focus groups or surveys as we wanted to include studies with qualitative findings (‘data’) on professionals’ experiences and views. You can find more information on what qualitative data are here. We wanted to include studies that focused on managing children’s chronic pain (lasting 3 months or more) and not related to cancer. We found over 7600 publications and looked at these to work out if they met our criteria for being included in our review. We selected 20 studies that were most relevant to the focus of our review and that gave the views of a wide range of professionals who treat lots of different types of chronic pain. We chose studies using a process called sampling that is often used in qualitative reviews. You can find an example of sampling in a short description of a completed review here. Then we assessed the quality of the studies using a new tool called CAMELOT which has been designed especially for qualitative reviews. We used an approach called thematic synthesis to analyse the qualitative data in the studies. You can find a short video describing thematic synthesis here. Finally, we used a tool called GRADE CERQual to help us share how confident we are in our review findings. If you would like to know more about our work, please get in touch! The protocol for this research project describes in detail the methods we planned to use and can be freely accessed by clicking on the text below:Experiences, perceptions and attitudes of health and social care professionals to management of children's chronic non-cancer pain – a qualitative evidence synthesisPROSPERO registration number: CRD420251001731 Click here to learn more about this research by reading our earlier blog.Click here to read about our progress so far! Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement is really important to our NESSIE work, and we are currently looking for people who might be interested in getting involved in this review. We are seeking: People over 18 years of age who experienced chronic non-cancer pain as a childParents or carers of children/young person experiencing chronic non-cancer painHealth or social care professionals who provide services for children with chronic non-cancer painPeople who work for a charity or other organisation that provides help for children with chronic, non-cancer pain and their families Please contact NESSIE@ed.ac.uk if you would like more information on how you can get involved. Follow us on social media to stay updated as the project progresses.Click here for links to social media This article was published on Friday 1 August 2025
