Rolling out innovative pain management technology to social care services

PainChek is an AI-powered tool that scans facial movements to assess the level of pain a person is in. The facial scan can be completed from up to three metres away, minimising any distress for the service user. Caregivers then use the tool to complete a guided assessment for other indicators of pain, such as body movement. The result is an overall pain score, which scores pain between 0-18. This allows caregivers to make more informed, documented clinical decisions about pain relief. 

Developed in Australia, the tool is already used in around 70% of residential care homes for older people there. It is now rapidly expanding to other parts of the world, including the UK, North America, Singapore and New Zealand.  

Within 6 months of launching the pilot:

• 18 care homes signed up to take part - almost a third of care homes in Gwent.
• Care homes across all five local authorities in Gwent involved, including private and local authority-funded homes.
• 905 residents benefitting. 

• Reductions in the use of antipsychotic medications. 
• Improved use of analgesics (pain relief). 
• Greater carer and resident safety and satisfaction.  

“NICE guidance recommends monthly pain assessments for residents of care homes. Typically, we see them being done much less frequently and, where they are done, they are often not formal, documented assessments. Where they are documented, this is usually not done ‘live’ with the resident, but written down some time later in the office. PainChek allows caregivers to conduct those regular pain assessments, document them in real time and access longitudinal data on how their residents are doing.” 

Aimee Twinberrow, former Project Lead at Life Sciences Hub Wales, now Digital Innovation Lead at Social Care Wales 

Independent analysis by KPMG of PainChek’s large-scale rollout across Australia indicated that participating homes saw pain scores decrease over time, suggesting PainChek has a positive impact on pain management and reduces pain burden for residents. 

Recent results from a pilot in England reported a 50% reduction in distressed behaviours thought to be associated with pain, and a 50% increase in the number of residents on regular pain relief as a result of newly identified pain. 

The evaluation in Gwent is exploring and verifying the benefits that PainChek reports for its global user base, producing evidence for the impact it has for service users in Wales. Some of the expected impacts for service users that should come from better management of pain relief include: 

• Reduced falls. 
• Improved nutrition through better intake of food and fluids. 
• Improvement in the symptoms of other conditions. 

Other pilots of PainChek have recorded as much as a 100% increase in the frequency of pain assessments being conducted in homes. For those assessments, care providers now have recorded evidence of pain assessments, captured more accurately in a ‘live’ scenario with residents, and more quickly than traditional paper-based assessments. 

Care home managers have access to an analytics portal to track an individual’s pain assessments, as well as whether improvements are being seen across their resident population.  

The pain assessments should equip caregivers to: 

• Make evidenced-based decisions on medication. 
• Reduce challenging behaviours in residents that are a result of poor pain management. 
• Improve data-sharing across multidisciplinary teams. Analysis of the rollout in Australia found that 78% of homes frequently shared PainChek results with GPs, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, and dementia support services. 

As a result of the better management of pain and challenging behaviours, it’s also expected that there will be a reduction in unplanned GP visits and hospital admissions. 

As an additional knock-on impact for caregivers, early feedback from care homes suggests that the tool is having a positive effect on building digital skills for carers.