Society for Pediatric Pain Medicine
Better Care for Children in Pain

The CDC  announces the opening of a docket to obtain comment on the proposed clinical practice guideline, CDC Clinical Practice Guideline for Prescribing Opioids—United States, 2022 (the clinical practice guideline).The clinical practice guideline provides evidence-based recommendations for clinicians who provide pain care, including those prescribing opioids, for outpatients age 18 years and older with acute pain (duration less than 1 month), subacute pain (duration of 1–3 months), or chronic pain (duration of 3 months or more), not including sickle cell disease related pain management, cancer pain treatment, palliative care, and end-of-life care.

To view the actual draft proposal, please visit here: https://www.regulations.gov/docket/CDC-2022-0024/document and download the “Draft_CDC Clinical Practice Guideline for Prescribing Opioids”

The AAP will host a Project ECHO learning collaborative on addiction treatment in pediatric settings. The goal of this ECHO is to increase pediatric provider knowledge and capacity to treat substance use disorders in a medical home setting, with a focus on opioid use disorder. For more information, click here. This ECHO will meet on the first and third Thursday of the month from March through June 2022. Register here. 

NIH’s Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) initiative to speed scientific solutions to the national opioid public health crisis has announced The NIH HEAL Initiative bolsters research across NIH to (1) improve treatment for opioid misuse and addiction and (2) enhance pain management. NIH has a funding announcement for this purpose, Letters of Intent (strongly encouraged) are due Feb 22nd. The application due date is March 23, 2022. Follow this link for more information: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-NS-22-037.html

There is an urgent need for more research to establish best practices in the pain management field, however, there is a limited workforce pipeline of pain researchers to meet NIH’s long-term goals of providing effective non-opioid options for the treatment of pain conditions and better pain management overall. The NIH is announcing the HEAL Initiative: National K12 Clinical Pain Career Development Program and HEAL Initiative: Coordinating Center for National Pain Scientists Career Development funding opportunities to promote career development of pain scientists.

If you are interested in learning more about these funding opportunities, please join the webinars on February 14th from 12:00 to 1:00pm ET (https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-NS-22-045.html) and February 15th from 12:00 to 1:00pm ET(https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-NS-22-046.html).