Using a Whole Health Approach to Build Biopsychosocial-Spiritual Personal Health Plans for Veterans with Chronic Pain.

Chronic pain affects over 50 million Americans per year and costs society billions of dollars annually. It is widely accepted that the biomedical model is outdated and research on the biopsychosocial model of chronic pain has increased in recent years, concurrent with investigations into self-management of chronic pain. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) has incorporated both of these approaches into their Whole Health System. This work describes the VHA Whole Health System, reviews the literature on alignment between the Whole Health System's Circle of Health and chronic pain, and explains how the VHA Whole Health model may be used as a method for organizing self-management strategies within a personal health plan in the context of chronic pain. Given the infusion of nurses throughout the healthcare system, nurses are in a unique position to champion this biopsychosocial-spiritual approach to care.

Innovative treatment formats, technologies, and clinician trainings that improve access to behavioral pain treatment for youth and adults.

Chronic pain is prevalent across the life span and associated with significant individual and societal costs. Behavioral interventions are recommended as the gold-standard, evidence-based interventions for chronic pain, but barriers, such as lack of pain-trained clinicians, poor insurance coverage, and high treatment burden, limit patients' ability to access evidenced-based pain education and treatment resources. Recent advances in technology offer new opportunities to leverage innovative digital formats to overcome these barriers and dramatically increase access to high-quality, evidenced-based pain treatments for youth and adults. This scoping review highlights new advances. First, we describe system-level barriers to the broad dissemination of behavioral pain treatment. Next, we review several promising new pediatric and adult pain education and treatment technology innovations to improve access and scalability of evidence-based behavioral pain treatments. Current challenges and future research and clinical recommendations are offered.

Chronic, Noncancer Pain Care in the Veterans Administration: Current Trends and Future Directions.

The Veterans Health Administration has always been a leader in the innovation and implementation of evidence-based care. The use of the stepped care model of chronic pain has led to several novel interventions and strong practices in the last several years at each level of care with regard to education, use of technology, and increasing access to evidence-based care (eg, behavioral health, interdisciplinary teams). The Whole Health model is also being implemented nationwide and has the potential to significantly affect chronic pain treatment in the coming decade.

Veteran participation in the integrative health and wellness program: Impact on self-reported mental and physical health outcomes.

Complementary and integrative health (CIH) services are being used more widely across the nation, including in both military and veteran hospital settings. Literature suggests that a variety of CIH services show promise in treating a wide range of physical and mental health disorders. Notably, the Department of Veterans Affairs is implementing CIH services within the context of a health care transformation, changing from disease based health care to a personalized, proactive, patient-centered approach where the veteran, not the disease, is at the center of care. This study examines self-reported physical and mental health outcomes associated with participation in the Integrative Health and Wellness Program, a comprehensive CIH program at the Washington DC VA Medical Center and one of the first wellbeing programs of its kind within the VA system. Using a prospective cohort design, veterans enrolled in the Integrative Health and Wellness Program filled out self-report measures of physical and mental health throughout program participation, including at enrollment, 12 weeks, and 6 months. Analyses revealed that veterans reported significant improvements in their most salient symptoms of concern (primarily pain or mental health symptoms), physical quality of life, wellbeing, and ability to participate in valued activities at follow-up assessments. These results illustrate the potential of CIH services, provided within a comprehensive clinic focused on wellbeing not disease, to improve self-reported health, wellbeing, and quality of life in a veteran population. Additionally, data support recent VA initiatives to increase the range of CIH services available and the continued growth of wellbeing programs within VA settings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).