Refer a chronic pain case

How we work with your practice

• Routine work stays with you. Vaccination, general medicine and surgery remain your client’s relationship with your practice. We manage the pain, and only the pain. Clinic patients have access to our affiliated out-of-hours emergency service.
• A letter after every material change. Assessment findings, the management plan, and every significant medication change come back to you in writing, as a matter of course, not on request.
• Who prescribes, and who doesn’t. A patient referred into the clinic comes formally under Claire’s care for their pain, and that includes diagnosis, prescribing and repeat analgesia; we take that on so you are not signing repeats for a plan you did not write. All other prescribing stays with you. We will tell you in writing what we have started, stopped or changed, and we will speak to you before altering anything you initiated. Painspan Remote works the other way round entirely: there, clinical responsibility never leaves you.
• Cases come back to you. Membership is month to month, and when a patient is stable and no longer needs this level of monitoring we say so. You get a discharge summary with the full trend history and the pain management returns to you. We would rather hand a settled case back than keep billing one that is doing well.
• Objective data you can use. Patients are monitored between visits with structured pain and quality-of-life scoring and objective gait analysis; trend summaries are yours whenever useful.

Outside our visiting area?

Refer anyway. Painspan Remote is our monitoring programme for patients anywhere in the UK: longitudinal pain scoring, gait analysis and functional assessment, with clinical responsibility remaining entirely with you. We monitor, we report to you, and you prescribe and treat as you see fit. For practices without the diary time to track a chronic case month by month, it is the part we can carry without taking anything else.

Good referrals for this clinic

Osteoarthritis that has outgrown first-line management, IVDD under conservative care, multimodal cases where owner adherence needs structure, and patients whose families want more contact time than a busy first-opinion diary allows. We see patients in Fitzrovia (Tuesdays and Thursdays) and at home across London and the South East.

What we don’t do

No nerve blocks, no intra-articular injections, no surgery and no diagnostic imaging: those belong with referral centres and we are not one. Claire is a general practitioner with a special interest in chronic pain, not an RCVS Advanced Practitioner or EBVS Recognised Specialist. If a case needs any of the above we will say so and send it back to you with a recommendation rather than hold onto it.

What it costs your client

The clinic is a £350 Complete Care Assessment with the first recheck included, then a £59 per month Continuity membership. Rechecks are £85 or £170, and a home visit carries a £100 supplement. Painspan Remote is £39 per month with no assessment fee. Both memberships are month to month and your client can stop at any time; we would rather you knew the figures before you mention us than after.