Practical Management of Complex Cancer Pain

Dr Manohar Sharma as a Consultant in Pain Medicine has been treating patient requiring advanced pain management techniques with in MDT set up over the last 16 year. He has been performing advanced pain techniques including cervical cordotomy and has published his own prospective outcome data as well as national cordotomy registry data. He has developed educational courses for European Pain Federation and in Liverpool to promote high quality pain management with in MDT set up. His other pain interests include interventional pain treatments including neuromodulation and trigeminal neuralgia interventions which he has widely published and promoted in his educational activities.


Dr Karen H. Simpson graduated from the School of Medicine at Leeds, UK in 1979. She met some very inspirational teachers in pain management during her undergraduate anaesthesia training in Leeds and Bradford. As a trainee she was seconded to the School of Pharmacy in Bradford University where she did basic science research. She started pain training in 1981 under the supervision of Dr Keith Budd who remained her mentor throughout her career.
As well as working within a large multi-professional Pain Management Service, she has a special interest in palliative medicine. She was chairman of the Regional Palliative Medicine Training Committee and she established Palliative Medicine training in Yorkshire. She was an Honorary Consultant at St Gemma's Hospice, Leeds. She retired from the NHS in 2016 and is now in private practice. She was a founder member of the Leeds Pallium Research Group. She was an FRCA examiner for 12 years.

Mike Bennett is the St Gemma's Professor of Palliative Medicine and is Director of the Academic Unit of Palliative Care. The Academic Unit is an internationally recognized multidisciplinary research and teaching unit based at the University of Leeds and St Gemma's Hospice, UK with 27 staff. In 2017, he secured formal University Teaching Hospice status for St Gemma's Hospice (first in the UK) where he works clinically 1 day per week. His main research interests are in cancer pain and neuropathic pain, and evaluating interventions at the end of life. Since taking up his post in Leeds, he has generated over GBP12.8m in research grants and awards. He has published over 230 papers in scientific journals resulting in H-index of 44 (Scopus). He led the writing of Core Standards for Cancer Pain which are now adopted into the NHS and form part of the CQC inspection framework, and led the writing of the cancer pain taxonomy for ICD-11 as part of the IASP task force.

Dr Sanjeeva Gupta completed his basic medical degree in 1988 from Mysore (South India) and was awarded MD (Anaesthesia) from the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, a Premier Institute in Chandigarh, India.

He trained at Belfast, Oxford and Cambridge and was appointed as a Consultant in Anaesthesia and Pain Medicine at the Bradford Teaching Hospitals in 1999. Sanjeeva passed an examination in 2004 to be awarded Fellow of Interventional Pain Medicine (FIPP) by the World Institute of Pain, USA. He was awarded the Fellow of the Faculty of Pain Medicine in 2007.

Currently Sanjeeva is a full-time consultant in Pain Medicine at the Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.