Guest blog: Chloe Davanna, Sport & Physical Activity Officer at Winchester City Council explains the ease of implementing the ESCAPE-pain programme at a Winchester leisure centre

ESCAPE-pain is an evidence-based group rehabilitation programme for people with chronic joint pain resulting from hip and or knee osteoarthritis. It integrates educational self-management and coping strategies with a personalised exercise plan.

Winchester City Council’s Physical Activity Team and River Park Leisure Centre have found the ESCAPE-pain programme to be highly rewarding, seeing the positive impact in just six weeks to the participant's mobility and pain levels but most important quality of life.

The ESCAPE-pain programme has been an easy initiative to incorporate into our current exercise referral scheme. Given the evidence from other programmes around the UK, our GP's and health professionals were happy to support the setting up of the initiative.  We have been supported throughout our implementation process as well as afterwards by the fantastic team at Wessex AHSN and the Health Innovation Network (HIN).

The ESCAPE-pain programme is a full package ready to be delivered with all the materials for the course ready to go, this makes the training straightforward and easy to follow when you are back delivering at your site. 

The standout element the AHSN has provided us with, is the knowledge they have about the programme and how we can deliver it within a leisure centre environment. They provided us with a range of useful tools which we were able to easily implement, for example, record how many people have osteoarthritis in Winchester, using the MSK calculator developed through Versus Arthritis.  We have then used this data to present the positive impact of the ESCAPE-pain programme to senior management and ensure the initiative would be successful in the Winchester District. 

We look forward to continuing to deliver the ESCAPE-pain programme within Winchester and growing the scheme across the District. 

Currently within Wessex we have 22 sites delivering ESCAPE-pain with another 9 in the final set up stages due to start cohorts by end of January 2020.

Wessex AHSN will continue to support new sites with set up and support facilitator training costs till the end of March 2020. Post this date we will continue to support sustainability plans for a further 6-12 months as needed.

Find out more about the project in the Wessex region - read more

Further information about the programme can be found on: www.escape-pain.org website.