After creating public awareness of chronic pain as an invisible illness, it was time to deepen community awareness of the way in which pain permeates every experience of people living with chronic pain.
Chronic Pain Australia again tasked Agenda C with creating a strategy to engage people living with chronic pain to complete the National Pain Survey, analyse the survey data, create an insightful report on the experiences of people living with chronic pain, and raise community awareness of chronic pain during National Pain Week.
For the first time in 2024, Chronic Pain Australia also asked Agenda C to extend its advocacy outreach by managing a Parliamentary Friends of Pain Management event at Australian Parliament House.
National Pain Week 2024
Opening Address
Creating a rigorous National Pain Survey
In order to sharpen the insights gathered by the annual National Pain Survey and make the data more useful for policy makers, Chronic Pain Australia asked Agenda C to advise on the questions that would be put to people living with chronic pain and their carers. Agenda C offered suggestions on wording and topics based on insights from past surveys and an understanding of the relevant issues which had become topical in 2024.
This survey questions were then submitted for ethics approval by the university partner, before being coded into their survey system.
The 2024 National Pain Survey campaign
In previous years, Agenda C had identified that people living with chronic pain often feel especially isolated and stigmatised because pain is an invisible condition. In 2023, we encouraged people living with chronic pain to open up about their condition. The Let Them Know How Strong You Are campaign brought to life the idea that people living with chronic pain were actually stronger than the people around them knew. That, far from revealing weakness, letting people know that everything they do, they do despite an additional burden, was something to be proud of.
In the 2024 National Pain Survey, respondents told us of the ways in which pain affects every aspect of their lives, from sleep, to relationships, to mental health. In the National Pain Report, Agenda C created a graphic which showed how these effects create a vicious cycle of pain.
Expanding on this awareness and increased comfort with sharing their invisible condition, in 2024, Agenda C developed a campaign to bring to life the way pain affects everything.
We called our campaign Pain Colours Your World. When you liv with chronic pain, it infuses everything you do and your experience of everything around it. It is like a filter which tinges the way you see everything in life.
We created a colour palette of pain representing some of the common ways pain colours people’s worlds and used real quotes from respondents to the 2023 National Pain Survey to promote responses to the 2024 National Pain Survey.
2024 National Pain Survey
Pain Colours Your World
The 2024 National Pain Report
In 2024, 2600 people told us about their experience of chronic pain. They told us about how chronic pain was affecting their relationships, from their ability to pick up children to their ability to be intimate with their partners. The report allowed us to corroborate the observation that pain affected every aspect of life, and emphasise the need for a multidisciplinary approach to pain management to government agencies.
Media campaign
The 2024 National Pain Report highlighted the impact of pain on productivity, the strain on relationships, the stigma and barriers to accessing treatment experienced by young Australians, medical misogyny, challenges for the LGBTQIA+ community, and the issue of slow diagnosis. We connected the survey findings to the hot button issue of cost of living, by highlighting the findings around the cost to people living with chronic pain of accessing appropriate care.
Our media campaign ran across commercial and public broadcasters, creating widespread interest in our findings and awareness of the way in which pain permeates the lives of those living with it and makes life harder for them and their families.
Social media, newsletter engagement, and webinars
During National Pain Week, Agenda C engaged audiences and raised awareness through a paid and organic social media campaign, regular email updates to members, and webinars to discuss managing chronic pain.
Media campaign
The 2024 National Pain Report highlighted the impact of pain on productivity, the strain on relationships, the stigma and barriers to accessing treatment experienced by young Australians, medical misogyny, challenges for the LGBTQIA+ community, and the issue of slow diagnosis. We connected the survey findings to the hot button issue of cost of living, by highlighting the findings around the cost to people living with chronic pain of accessing appropriate care.
Our media campaign ran across commercial and public broadcasters, creating widespread interest in our findings and awareness of the way in which pain permeates the lives of those living with it and makes life harder for them and their families.
Agenda C organised and managed a Parliamentary Friends of Pain Management event in the last sitting week of the year.
Our event was designed to publicly commit politicians and stakeholder groups to our cause, as well as informing them by providing them with brief and easily understood materials to take with them, to help them remember the ask being made by the sector.
In the brief amount of time politicians were are able to spend with us, we aimed to:
Introduce them to someone living with chronic pain.
Capture photographs of them with that person in front of our media wall to create a public bond between them and our issue (we developed an unusual visual device that tied in with our messaging)
Introduce them to pain sector stakeholders, who were able to make a brief pitch.
To link our key proposition that ‘pain colours your world’ with the idea that we were offering politicians a unique insight into an invisible condition, we created hand-outs with hidden messages and gave politicians attending our event coloured glasses. Putting the coloured glasses on revealed the hidden messages about the impact of the invisible condition in our handout.
The
results
- Recognised condition
Chronic pain is now a recognised condition, which the public realises has broader impacts beyond the person living with the condition.
- Better services
Politicians recognise the importance of better services for chronic pain management.
