Ivana Crnković

University of Applied Health Sciences, Croatia

Title: Management of Chronic Pain in Long-Term Care Users During the COVID-19 Pandemic

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Biography

She is a senior lecturer in the Department of Physiotherapy, specializing in Clinical Health Sciences with an emphasis on Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. A long-standing associate of the Slovenian Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, she has actively contributed to numerous scientific and professional projects. She is the author of several dozen publications indexed in Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar, and serves as editor and co-author of Pulmonary Rehabilitation, the first university textbook on the subject in Croatia.

Abstract

In 2020, the World Health Organization officially declared the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in significant consequences for global health and quality of life, with a burden on all public sectors. The fear of COVID-19 infection, along with current public health measures for older adults with chronic pain in long-term care (LTC), resulted in radical changes in everyday life in the institutional unit, but also in additional inertia and all-day stay of users in their personal space with increased social deprivation. The prolonged duration of public health measures for LTC users with chronic pain resulted in long-term and negative consequences of the pandemic on the modulation and control of chronic pain, which resulted in increased health and non-health care costs. Precisely the increased workload of the members of the multidisciplinary gerontological team during pandemic management, along with the simultaneous increase of needs of LTC users with chronic pain for multimodal gerontological care, lead to pain management often being dominated by the prescription of drug therapy. The absence of regular physical activity, as a relevant non-pharmacological option, resulted in an additional impairment of motor and cardiorespiratory statuses, a decrease in functional capacity and an increase in dependence on other people's help, and in a general decline in psychological well-being and worsening of chronic pain in LTC users. It is the COVID-19 pandemic, as a unique experiment which has irreversibly changed gerontological practice, that supports evidence of the inverse relationship between the clinical entity of chronic pain and inclusion in physical activity. These indicators are a message to the health and social care systems for future pandemic events, that the integration of problem-oriented physical activity in a multimodal gerontological program is an essential non-pharmacological strategy in the management of chronic pain in LTC users.