Pain clinic patients in northern Britain

A patient survey was undertaken in ten outpatient pain clinics in Scotland and the north of England. Over a 1 year period, a total of 7572 consultations were recorded for 3106 individual patients, just over half of whom were new referrals (1644 patients, 22 per cent of all consultations). General Practitioners were the largest source of patients (44 per cent), followed by Orthopaedic Surgeons (16 per cent) and General Surgeons (9.4 per cent). The median age of patients was 53 years and there were 50 percent more women than men. Pain was most frequently reported in the 'lower back' (37 per cent) and 'buttock or lower limb' (30 per cent), with a third of patients reporting pain at more than one body site. The most common causes of the pain problem were 'degenerative' (35 per cent), 'surgery' (20 per cent) and 'trauma' (17 per cent). A further 18 per cent of patients had pain with 'no definite cause'. Marked variations in the sex-ratio and age distribution between different pain locations and different pain causes were found. Over two thirds of patients had been in pain for longer than two years and 68 per cent described their pain as 'more or less continuous'. Patients often made repeated visits to the pain clinics: over three quarters of consultations were spent seeing patients who had been previously seen. Many difficulties were found in using body location and cause to describe the pain patients.