UICC World Cancer Congress 2006

Objective: Many efforts around the world are designed to improve pain management. There are few mechanisms to allow the easy adaptation and use of knowledge generated within a project to a different setting. As a result, most successful efforts to improve pain management tend to have limited impact beyond the context within which they are developed. In response to this challenge, the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, the International Union against Cancer (UICC), and Purdue Pharma are collaborating with partners in Latin America to pilot and evaluate methods of adapting successful approaches to pain relief internationally, using the Internet as the primary medium of both development and delivery.

Methods:

The methods include four phases: Research & Development, Prototype Development, Evaluation, and Planning for Deployment. Each phase will be described, including the needs assessment and gap analysis; development of the 5 prototype resources, evaluation mechanisms for both the content and technological transfer components; and finally an overview of the Internet tools that allowed for this project to happen virtually over vast geographic distances. Results: Five new web-based resources on pain management are available in Spanish, with evaluation of the knowledge and technology transfer process that underlined their adaptation to the Internet in linguistically, culturally, and technologically relevant ways. In addition, community building tools were also developed in Spanish and are available independent of the web-resources for other knowledge transfer endeavours. The evaluation data are also concrete results that will be discussed, including the initial on-line needs assessment and resource selection process.