Goals:
– Personalise care for people with shoulder pain
– Ensure that people receive the care that is best for them & avoid unnecessary investigations and treatments.
– Shoulder impingement and frozen shoulder, affect one in five adults
– It can be very painful, affecting sleep, work, and day-to-day life.
– 40% experience ongoing pain despite treatment.
– There is little evidence that surgery provides better results than non-surgical treatments,
7 times more people are undergoing surgery than 10 years ago.
Principal investigator Professor Danielle van der Windt, Professor of Primary Care Epidemiology at Keele University, said: “Many patients with shoulder pain recover quickly, but in others the pain does not diminish and can affect sleep, work and everyday life for many months. At the moment, we don’t have good evidence that can help clinicians to identify patients at increased risk and make decisions about which treatment is likely to be best.”
Dr Natalie Carter, Head of Research Liaison & Evaluation at Arthritis Research UK, said:
“Everyone experiences arthritis differently, which is why making sure patients with shoulder pain are given treatments which will give the best results for them and their condition will make a huge difference on a person’s life.”