Author name: Meredith Smith
Author biography:
Meredith is a PhD candidate, physiotherapist, and lecturer in physiotherapy at the University of Adelaide. Meredith’s research focusses on adapting chronic pain assessment for children and young people with cerebral palsy. Meredith also works clinically at Novita and the Women’s and Children’s Hospital.
Author contact details: Meredith.smith@adelaide.edu.au
2024 Australian Pain Society 44th Annual Scientific Meeting
It was fantastic to receive an APS travel grant to enable me to attend the APS conference in Darwin. I was really excited to present as part of a workshop on ‘Pain assessment in children and young people with cerebral palsy: challenges and solutions’. The other presenters in the workshop were colleagues from around Australia – Nadine Smith from Perth, Adrienne Harvey from Melbourne, and Abi Thirumanickam from Adelaide.
The workshop was a wonderful opportunity to share some of the work we have been doing in developing a framework for chronic pain assessment in cerebral palsy, as well as presenting the initial versions of the modified assessment tools we have developed and tested for young people with cerebral palsy. We had an excellent discussion with those who attended the workshop about the possible next steps and clinical/research uses for the developed assessment framework and modified tools. I was also able to present a poster which explained the specific adaptations needed to the tools. These adaptations were identified from a qualitative with people with lived experience of cerebral palsy and their parents.
This is the second APS conference I have attended, and yet again I was impressed with the high quality of presentations and the warm welcome from the APS community. It was lovely to reconnect with those I met last year, and to see some of the progress in their research work. I really enjoyed the keynote talks this year, particularly Christine Chambers’ presentation on knowledge translation in paediatric pain. I have been reflecting on this as I feel it is core to our role in promoting best practice to the wider community. For our work in cerebral palsy, this looks like involving people with lived experience from the very beginning of the projects (including helping to decide what is important to research). It also prompted me to reflect on creative strategies that might be useful in distributing research knowledge.
Outside of conference time, it was great to be able to see Darwin and explore Litchfield National Park! After such a wonderful time this year, I am really looking forward to attending the Annual Scientific Meeting again in 2025.
Declaration: Meredith Smith has nothing to declare.
Australian Pain Society 