Work and pain

Elaine Wainwright is Senior Lecturer in Applied Psychology at Bath Spa University and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Pain Research, University of Bath. She is interested in intersections between pain and employment in its broadest sense across the lifespan. Her PhD examined the process of sickness certification for people living with chronic pain. Elaine has published peer reviewed journal articles from her doctorate and carried out commissioned research into whether evidence based practice can improve sickness certification rates from work. She is currently working on funded research looking at reducing work attrition for people in pain and has an overlapping research interest in improving working conditions for professionals. Elaine is also working with research teams investigating whether schoolchildren in pain have different career-related worries from those not in pain, and what we know about resilience for workers in pain. She is a chartered psychologist.

Christopher Eccleston is Professor of Medical Psychology at the University of Bath where he directs the Centre for Pain Research. He is particularly interested in evidence based medicine, innovation in treatments for chronic pain, paediatric chronic pain, and the use of communication technology in psychological medicine. In 2016 he published a psychology of physical sensation called 'embodied' which explores what we know about all proprioception and interoception with a focus on how people try to make sense of their embodied experience. He is particularly interested in the development of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary teams for the management of complex refractory pain, and how to re-develop ideas of the pain clinic. In 2018 he published a review of pain services across Europe and is keen to develop novel models of care and new ways to access expertise.