In September 2015, the University of Iowa was named as one of eleven NIH Centers of Excellence in Pain Education (CoEPE). In the 2011 Institute of Medicine (IOM) Report Relieving Pain in America, an urgency related to improving pain education for undergraduate and graduate students was established as one strategy to address the healthcare system’s deficiencies in managing pain. The creation of CoEPEs addresses this national need to improve pain education. According to NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, "Virtually all health professionals are called upon to help patients suffering from pain. These new centers will translate current research findings about pain management to fill what have been recognized as gaps in curricula so clinicians in all fields can work with their patients to make better and safer choices about pain treatment."
The initial award to the University is $77,871, with a maximum award of $914,562 over 5 years. The final award amount will be determined by the number of modules the project team and National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) choose to execute. The UI CoEPE case development team will include pain experts from Nursing, Medicine, Physician Assistant, Pharmacy, Public Health, Social Work, Dentistry and Psychology. More detail
Objective and Project Main Activities
Organization Chart updated in Nov 2017
Poster Abstract for IASP 16th World Congress on Pain in September 2016