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

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

Abstract

In 2020, the World Health Organization officiallydeclared the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in significant consequences forglobal health and quality of life, with a burden on all public sectors. The fearof COVID-19 infection, along with current public health measures for olderadults with chronic pain in long-term care (LTC), resulted in radical changesin everyday life in the institutional unit, but also in additional inertia andall-day stay of users in their personal space with increased socialdeprivation. The prolonged duration of public health measures for LTC userswith chronic pain resulted in long-term and negative consequences of thepandemic on the modulation and control of chronic pain, which resulted inincreased health and non-health care costs. Precisely the increased workload ofthe members of the multidisciplinary gerontological team during pandemicmanagement, along with the simultaneous increase of needs of LTC users withchronic pain for multimodal gerontological care, lead to pain management often beingdominated by the prescription of drug therapy. The absence of regular physicalactivity, as a relevant non-pharmacological option, resulted in an additionalimpairment of motor and cardiorespiratory statuses, a decrease in functionalcapacity and an increase in dependence on other people's help, and in a generaldecline in psychological well-being and worsening of chronic pain in LTC users.It is the COVID-19 pandemic, as a unique experiment which has irreversiblychanged gerontological practice, that supports evidence of the inverserelationship between the clinical entity of chronic pain and inclusion inphysical activity. These indicators are a message to the health and social caresystems for future pandemic events, that the integration of problem-orientedphysical activity in a multimodal gerontological program is an essentialnon-pharmacological strategy in the management of chronic pain in LTC users.