Title: PRISM: Pain Relief Intervention using Self Management
Funder: Department of Health and Social Care

Abstract: What is the problem we want to address? Pain is one of the most common and bothersome problems for people with HIV. It affects all areas of a person s life, leading to poor mental health, difficulty in working, poorer ability to take medications, and it can affect someone s experience of health care. Although there is good HIV treatment to ensure that people have a normal life span, pain is still very common, and people living with HIV can experience more of the pains that older people have. What do we want to do? We will bring together people living with HIV, researchers and health professionals. This new team will develop the best possible way to address this problem. In this &ldquo;development&rdquo; research proposal, we deliver the work that is needed to be able to deliver a much bigger study to test out a new way of improving pain. In the next bigger study we want to test out a way of pain management that focuses on the person that is living with the pain, to help them to manage it better themselves. We want to see how best to roll this out for community benefit UK-wide. How will we do this? In this first smaller &ldquo;development&rdquo; grant we will do several things. First, we will bring together people living with HIV and professionals. We will build an expert team that has the best chance of developing a way to manage pain that is going to work, and that people can easily use. Second, we are going to work on some research data that has been collected from people living with HIV to better understand how much pain they have, where in the body they have it, and how it affects them. This will help is understand what we should focus on to improve pain. Third, we will talk with different groups of people living with HIV who have pain and show them the kinds of things that have already been delivered to people living with HIV around the world. We will focus on the pain self-management approaches that have worked in other parts of the world, and get a sense of which ones people think would be best for us to try here in the UK. Self management usually means understanding how a health problem affects a person's life and how to cope with their symptoms. Lastly, we will use all of the work done together in this research project to write the much larger proposal, which will test out the new pain reduction approach. This new way of reducing pain will be designed, tested and rolled out nationally in partnership with communities of people living with HIV.

Lay abstract: What is the problem we want to address? Pain is one of the most common and bothersome problems for people with HIV. It affects all areas of a person s life, leading to poor mental health, difficulty in working, poorer ability to take medications, and it can affect someone s experience of health care. Although there is good HIV treatment to ensure that people have a normal life span, pain is still very common, and people living with HIV can experience more of the pains that older people have. What do we want to do? We will bring together people living with HIV, researchers and health professionals. This new team will develop the best possible way to address this problem. In this &ldquo;development&rdquo; research proposal, we deliver the work that is needed to be able to deliver a much bigger study to test out a new way of improving pain. In the next bigger study we want to test out a way of pain management that focuses on the person that is living with the pain, to help them to manage it better themselves. We want to see how best to roll this out for community benefit UK-wide. How will we do this? In this first smaller &ldquo;development&rdquo; grant we will do several things. First, we will bring together people living with HIV and professionals. We will build an expert team that has the best chance of developing a way to manage pain that is going to work, and that people can easily use. Second, we are going to work on some research data that has been collected from people living with HIV to better understand how much pain they have, where in the body they have it, and how it affects them. This will help is understand what we should focus on to improve pain. Third, we will talk with different groups of people living with HIV who have pain and show them the kinds of things that have already been delivered to people living with HIV around the world. We will focus on the pain self-management approaches that have worked in other parts of the world, and get a sense of which ones people think would be best for us to try here in the UK. Self management usually means understanding how a health problem affects a person's life and how to cope with their symptoms. Lastly, we will use all of the work done together in this research project to write the much larger proposal, which will test out the new pain reduction approach. This new way of reducing pain will be designed, tested and rolled out nationally in partnership with communities of people living with HIV.

Research activity codes: 7.1 INDIVIDUAL CARE NEEDS
Health categories: INFECTION