Our Services
Pediatric Pain Program
Our pediatric program helps children and youth living with chronic pain. Did you know that 1 in 5 children/youth live with chronic pain?
The approach of our program is wholistic, with consideration of mind, body, and spirit aspects of care, and an understanding of each patient’s unique experience within their family and school environments.
To help us understand the full picture, a team-based care model is used. That means each patient is usually assessed by 2-3 members of the multidisciplinary team in order to support children and youth living with chronic pain move toward pain management and work on functional care goals.
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You may meet with a team that includes doctors, nurses, therapists, and mental health professionals.
We focus on helping kids do the things that matter to them—like going to school, playing, and spending time with friends.
We also offer group sessions where youth can learn about pain and connect with others going through similar things.
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A nurse and/or Indigenous navigator may be involved in helping decide what treatments may be available in our program to connect you with the right care.
A doctor or nurse practitioner helps with diagnosis, medications, and treatment planning.
A physiotherapist helps with movement and physical activity to manage pain.
An occupational therapist helps with tools and plans to make school or daily life easier.
A psychotherapist or psychologist may help with emotional health and pain-related stress.
Children and youth living with pain, and their families, are supported throughout their journey and as goals of care are met may be discharged from our program. If a youth requires ongoing care and are entering adulthood, they will be supported in a seamless transition of care into the adult chronic pain program.
Indigenous Approaches to Healing
At NICHE Pain Care, we are committed to a Two-Eyed Seeing approach. This means we honour both Indigenous and Western ways of understanding health, and we recognize that neither is more important than the other—they are stronger when woven together.
We are working closely with Elders and Knowledge Keepers to guide us. Their wisdom is helping shape every part of our clinic, from how we design our services to how we welcome and care for people.
We follow a Visioning, Scouting, Hunting/Gathering, and Feasting model, which helps us embed Indigenous knowledge into our services in sustainable and meaningful ways.
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We are developing services that may include traditional healing, plant-based medicines, ceremony, and land-based practices.
An Indigenous Navigator may help patients and families access care and guide them through their journey with us.
Financial supports are available to help with travel, accommodations, and treatment costs, especially for Indigenous patients—similar to Jordan’s Principle. We aim to keep barriers as low as possible so care can happen when and where it’s needed.
Our team is committed to being informed, to learning continuously, and to offering care that is culturally safe and rooted in humility. We acknowledge that Western-based medicine is not the only way, or even the best way, to care for people living with chronic pain
We invite patients, families, and communities to guide us. Together, we are building something unique and long-lasting.
Please see our IDEAL Framework for more about the values and goals that shape our work at NICHE Pain Care.
Collaborative Care Hub
A carefully selected team of physiotherapists, occupational therapists, and psychotherapists are available to work on specific goals to springboard patients with a care plan that goes beyond reliance on medications and coping with pain, but with a focus on function. We are continuously considering and adding care providers to our team with unique skill sets to meet the needs of our patients, and to be inclusive of the diverse and wholistic needs of our patients.
We aspire to meet patient goals of care in a holistic manner, and the highly skilled care providers part of our team work synergistically for the best patient care outcomes. Interdisciplinary approaches are considered a gold standard in chronic pain care, reflecting that patients may have complex needs that cannot be solved by just one provider.
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Your care plan is tailored based on your specific needs, and may involve more than one provider
You may choose to work with one care provider at a time, or with several providers simultaneously
Future plans for our allied health team may include social workers, pharmacists, kinesiologists, chiropractors, and more.
Future Services
Our pain clinic is actively working on projects that will lead to new local pain care options. A pilot program for a Transitional Pain Service is currently being conducted with a research grant to support patients at risk of chronic pain after surgery, with patients who have pre-existing chronic pain being more vulnerable. Most patients post-surgically recover within an expected timeframe, but some struggle to meet benchmark recovery goals. Patients receiving timely support with an evidence-based approach are less likely to develop chronic pain, become dependent on opioids, and struggle with function and quality of life.
Future treatment options may include specialized pain care options for women with pelvic pain, headache care, regenerative medicine, and complex pain syndromes. Women experience higher rates of chronic pain than men, and often experience delays in diagnosis of their pain issues, with endometriosis as one common example.
Specialized headache management, with migraines being both common and underdiagnosed, as well as many other causes of headache, can often successfully be managed by pain specialists and multidisciplinary teams.
Regenerative medicine is a type of treatment which seeks to use the body’s natural healing processes to help tissues recover from an injury, and typically refers to platelet rich plasma (PRP) or prolotherapy injections. This treatment in combination with a healthy lifestyle and often active-physiotherapy guidance can significantly improve certain musculoskeletal conditions.
Complex pain syndromes again benefit from interdisciplinary and multimodal approaches to treatment. Beyond fibromyalgia, our team is building capacity to take on complex pain management in a variety of pain syndromes that may include hypermobility spectrum disorders, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, mast cell activation syndrome, and others.