Dr Christine Chambers has a lot of roles and responsibilities – clinical psychologist, Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Children’s Pain, Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience and Pediatrics at Dalhousie University, Scientific Director of Solutions for Kids in Pain, Scientific Director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)’s Institute of Human Development, Child and Youth Health (IHDCYH), mother of four, and Associate Director of the North American Pain School. She is an international leader in children’s pain and is an innovator in patient engagement, partnerships, and knowledge mobilisation.
Chambers is also an international keynote speaker at the upcoming 44th Annual Scientific Meeting (ASM) of the Australian Pain Society, which will be held in Darwin from April 21-24, 2024. In the lead-up to the ASM, Chambers spoke with Lincoln Tracy, a researcher and writer from Melbourne, Australia, discussing the variety of hats she wears, the importance of building relationships, and why she’s looking forward to coming back to Australia for the first time in a decade. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What was your path to becoming an international leader in children’s pain research?
When I was 12 years old, I read a book about a child psychologist who helped troubled children. After reading that book, I became very focused on the idea that I wanted to be a child psychologist when I grew up. When I made it to university at Dalhousie, where I’m now a faculty member, I went and spoke to an advisor and explained I was doing a psychology degree and wanted to become a child psychologist. They filled me in on all the things that I would need to do, including recommending that I get involved in research, as this would help when I was ready to apply to grad school.
I said, ‘well, that’s great – what areas of research do you have in child psychology here at the university?’. They only had one child psychologist in the department, and he studied children’s pain management. I had no idea what that was at the time. But when I reached out to him, we had a great meeting. I ended up buying his book and quickly became fascinated by the world of children’s pain management and the opportunity to make a difference through research.
After that meeting I became really active in research throughout my undergraduate degree, which continued when I transitioned into my PhD at the University of British Columbia with Dr Ken Craig, another leader in children’s pain management. And I’ve followed that path for 30 years after falling into it by accident – but I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity because I’ve been fortunate enough to work in such an interesting and important area where I’ve been able to connect with many different people and feel like our work is making a difference.
Does the fact you can clearly see the impact of your work help keep you motivated after all these years?
Absolutely. The improvements we’ve seen in children’s pain care over the 30 years I’ve been involved in research, in hospitals and in other settings, are incredible. What’s also amazing is how the volume of literature and knowledge in this space has expanded. I remember when I first moved out west for grad school, I could fit every article that had been published about children’s pain into one file box! I’ve always been committed to children and love working with children, so being in a field where you can make a difference has certainly helped sustain my motivation and my interest in the work we do. And while we’ve come a long way, nothing is ever complete and there is still so much more that needs to be done.
What projects are you and your team currently working on?
I’m fortunate enough to run three different teams because of all the different hats I wear, and two of them operate in the research space. The first is my research lab, where I work with trainees and staff to answer the full range of research questions in children’s pain management and psychosocial factors that influence children’s pain using various research methodologies. I have couple of a new trainees working with me to help increase our understanding of how equity, diversity, and inclusion relates to children’s pain. It’s always exciting to work with new research trainees and staff.
The other team I run in the research sphere is Solutions for Kids in Pain, or SKIP, which is a national knowledge mobilisation network that spun off from my research lab and has been funded by the federal government’s Networks of Centres of Excellence. This has been a fascinating experience because we’re not allowed to use any of our grant money for research or training – it’s all to support moving the research we already have into practice and policy. But we’ve learned a lot about where the gaps are in our existing research knowledge and what areas we need to focus on. Getting the opportunity to collaborate with partners outside of academia – whether they’re not-for-profit organisations or patients – to make sure our research doesn’t just sit on the shelf has been exciting.
Was it challenging to enter the world of knowledge mobilisation?
I think it was a natural transition because we’d been experimenting with the idea of knowledge mobilisation in my research lab for five or six years before we were able to secure funding to make it a separate thing. In fact, the last time I was in Australia was a few months after I had launched the It Doesn’t Have to Hurt video on YouTube, which was a small project where we filmed a little girl telling parents about evidence-based things they should or shouldn’t do to help manage their kids fear of pain and distress about getting needles.
I like to joke my lab had a bit of an identity crisis during this time because we were already doing all these creative projects – they weren’t research projects – and we could see we were getting a lot of traction with them. I also joke that I almost bankrupted my lab because you only have so much capacity and energy to put into new things when you also have to keep the lights on and keep doing the research. And then when the federal government launched their call for national knowledge mobilisation networks, it just felt like the perfect thing do to because we were already doing something more than just research.
You also serve as a scientific director with the Canadian Institute of Health Research – how did the opportunity to move into this space come about?
I have been applying to the CIHR for funding since I was an early career investigator and previously served on their peer review panels. But as you progress through your career, you have opportunities to serve on advisory boards for the 13 different institutes that cover the full range of human health. I was serving on the advisory board for one of the institutes and was standing in the buffet line between meetings one day when the director of the institute I was working with tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘you’re good – you should consider applying for a job with the Institute for Human Development and Child Youth Health when the opportunity comes up’.
I felt I could do the job, so when the scientific director position was posted, I applied and am grateful I was selected and started in January 2020 just before the pandemic. The roles are two four-year terms, and it’s hard to believe that it’s already been four years. But I’ve enjoyed the role immensely and get to work with an incredible team that has allowed me to drive impactful research and foster collaborations in a broader way than just exclusively on pain in children.
What are you hoping to achieve in your second four-year term as a scientific director?
There are several things I want to continue to move forward over the next four years. One is our Healthy Youth Initiative, where we are showing the value of bringing the voices of youth and their parents into health. We’ve formed a youth advisory council and had several youth-led events. The other thing I, along with colleagues in other institutes, have been championing for is a lifecycle approach at the CIHR – developing inclusive policies and approaches to make sure children are not excluded from research, which often happens.
What have you learned about yourself as you have progressed through your career?
I’ve learned about the importance of resilience, adaptability, and effective leadership. The qualities that make for a world-class researcher are not necessarily the same qualities that make good leaders in administrative roles. I’ve reflected a lot on how we could do a better job of supporting and developing researchers and leaders – and it’s all about relationships, particularly when you’re balancing important or tough decisions.
I’ve also learned it takes more than writing papers and grants to really move the needle for patients in pain. The academic environment is a hypercompetitive system, and I don’t think that always brings out the best in people. People often say to me, ‘I love the direction you’ve taken your career and all the knowledge mobilisation work you do – it’s very different and creative’. But I was only able to take that leap into exploring different ways to make a difference because I was a tenured professor with a very solid scientific background. I was critiqued and teased for doing it, but we need to be more open minded to different pathways we can take to so our work can be impactful and help people.
So knowing what you know about yourself now, what advice would you give to your younger self?
I would emphasise the importance of building a strong support network by surrounding yourself by mentors, collaborators, and a diverse team that will help amplify your creativity and success. I think that’s obvious. But the part I really wish I had known when I was younger is that you will need different people at different points in time. We often don’t think about the evolution of our relationships, but in hindsight I can certainly say different people have played different roles in my professional life at different times – but at the time I felt that things should be more constant. And I feel accepting that things are more fluid would have been helpful. But I was very stubborn when I was younger, so I probably wouldn’t listen to myself if I went back and tried to give any advice [laughs].
Has there been a paper or project from your career that you’re particularly proud of, or that is somehow special to you?
This would have to be It Doesn’t Have to Hurt, which was a partnership grant funded by the CIHR in 2015 to launch a social media partnership to mobilise research evidence about children’s pain. It was so radically different to anything I had done before. I partnered with a Canadian celebrity and businesswoman who ran an online mother’s forum. We brought leading experts in children’s pain management together with a panel of parent partners who let us know what Canadian parents wanted to know about children’s pain.
And we worked with these incredible digital content creators at this online forum to marry the evidence and parent narratives into compelling digital content. It went viral in Canada over the two years we worked on the project. And the most incredible thing was that the parents became the primary disseminators of the research evidence through their own social media platforms and networks. That experience took me out of my world and showed me the power of partnership and how we could better position ourselves, so our work had better impact. It was the least amount of grant money I’d ever had, but it was by far the most impactful project I’d been involved in to that point in my career. It really catalysed so much of what has followed and laid a lot of the groundwork for SKIP.
What did being able to help other parents and their children mean to you, as a parent?
It was incredibly meaningful, as a parent of four kids. It was becoming a mom and having my own experiences with the healthcare system with my children – whether it was surgeries, emergency department visits, or hospitalisations – that sparked my interest in knowledge mobilisation. These experiences made me realise all the great evidence I had dedicated my career to – everything I’d published in journals and presented at conferences around the world – wasn’t being used to help my own children. And if the science I had generated isn’t being used to help my own kids, then it’s definitely not helping others.
That made me realise I needed to go about things in a different way. I didn’t get into research just to publish papers and get invitations to do talks. I wanted to get into research to make a difference for kids. I’d always felt like I had a tremendous sense of purpose. But it wasn’t until I became a mother that my perspective changed, and I realised what I wanted my purpose to be. And that really motivated me. It’s incredibly fulfilling to hear parents and kids talk about how our work has helped them or made a difference in their lives.
Is there a particular paper or book you would recommend people read to gain an understanding of the importance of managing pain in children?
There’s so many great articles and videos. But the one paper I always come back to is an article from 2014 that was written by André Picard, one of Canada’s leading health reporters, called ‘Why does children’s pain get the short shrift?’. This was around the time where I was just starting to innovate and try things with knowledge mobilisation. I’d just joined Twitter to promote the It Doesn’t Have to Hurt video we had created for parents and became very connected with a variety of people, including André.
I used to tweet about new papers I had read, where I would provide a one sentence summary of the paper and link to it. One Sunday I tweeted about an article from a Canadian colleague of mine about inadequate pain management in the paediatric emergency department when André sent me a message out of the blue, asking if I could send him the article. I thought it was wild that Canada’s leading health reporter didn’t have access to the scientific literature, but I sent him the article, along with a few of our own. He immediately wrote back and said, ‘I’m going to write an article about this’.
The next morning, he asked if he could speak with me. So, we did an interview, and two days later this incredibly powerful two-page story appeared in our national newspaper and ignited a real firestorm of conversation. I reread the article recently, and it’s still one of the best articles I’ve ever read. Every time I read it, I just feel like he really understood the issues in the literature and presented them in a way that was so important – but still brought a real human lens to it.
The story itself is excellent, but I also love to share the story of how it happened. Talk about shrinking the gap between research and practice, policy, and public awareness! One tweet took a paper that was behind a paywall to a national forum over the course of a weekend – all because of a relationship that had formed from putting myself out there in a non-traditional way.
What are you looking forward to the most about coming back to Australia for the ASM?
There are so many things! I’ve always felt this incredible collegiality among Australians, and even the Australian Pain Society itself has been enormously supportive over the past 10 years since I last visited. They even wrote a letter of support when we were applying for our initial SKIP grant. I’ve always felt like I had this strong supporter base in Australia, so I’m looking forward to connecting with the people. I’m also excited to learn what’s going on and share what we’ve been up to. We were all pretty siloed during covid, so we’ve really been focused on improving pain management in children in Canada – I can’t wait for the opportunity to share, reconnect, and maybe find some new collaborative opportunities.
Lincoln Tracy is a postdoctoral research fellow at Monash University and freelance writer from Melbourne, Australia. He is a member of the Australian Pain Society and enthusiastic conference attendee. You can follow him on X (@lincolntracy) or check out some of his other writing and interviews on his website.
Australian Pain Society 