Table 2.
Perceived Barriers to Chronic Pain Management
| Barrier | Always n (%) |
Sometimes n (%) |
Never n (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure | |||
| Lack of interdisciplinary team support | 54 (56.3%) | 36 (37.5%) | 6 (6.3%) |
| Difficulty providing care to rural patients due to distance | 21 (28.0%) | 44 (58.7%) | 10 (13.3%) |
| Lack of receiving patient data from other healthcare providers | 17 (19.8%) | 58 (67.4%) | 11 (12.8%) |
| Difficulty prioritizing patients from waitlist | 15 (21.4%) | 28 (40.0%) | 27 (38.6%) |
| Clinical Assessment | |||
| Lack of time for shared decision making with patient | 30 (30.3%) | 51 (51.5%) | 18 (18.2%) |
| Lack of time to review and discussing patients’ responses on intake form during visit | 26 (32.9%) | 39 (49.4%) | 14 (17.7%) |
| Lack of time to assess patient reported outcomes | 25 (27.8%) | 51 (56.7%) | 14 (15.6%) |
| Difficulty manually scoring questionnaire results | 9 (14.5%) | 29 (46.8%) | 24 (38.7%) |
| Difficulty assessing patient risk for opioid abuse | 7 (7.4%) | 73 (76.8%) | 15 (15.8%) |
| Difficulty building trust with patients | 4 (4.0%) | 77 (77.8%) | 18 (18.2%) |
| Clinical Treatment | |||
| Difficulty identifying community pain resources for referral | 50 (50.5%) | 44 (44.4%) | 5 (5.1%) |
| Difficulty managing co-occurring mental health conditions | 32 (32.0%) | 61 (61.0%) | 7 (7.0%) |
| Difficulty having conversations regarding medication abuse | 27 (29.0%) | 38 (40.9%) | 28 (30.1%) |
| Fear of prescribing opioids | 12 (12.0%) | 79 (79.0%) | 9 (9.0%) |
| Difficulty making decisions about whether patient would or would not benefit from a specific treatment plan | 10 (10.0%) | 69 (69.0%) | 21 (21.0%) |
Note. Physicians could select “not applicable” for any barrier that did not apply to their practice (not shown here for simplicity). The percent displayed is based only on the number of respondents for whom the barrier was applicable; consequently, raw scores in each row may not sum to 100