ROHKEA: Virtual Reality Therapy 12-week Programme for Chronic Pain

One in four people experience low back pain. 20% of adults suffer with chronic pain, with less than 1% having access to pain management services. Torbay has the highest under 75 years mortality rate in the South West, UK, and chronic pain can account for an increase in mortality by 10 years. Pain Management is seen as a luxury good, and scalable solutions are needed. Using Virtual Reality therapies in the patient's own home, will provide a therapeutic bridge to assist their transition back into richer, and more meaningful lives, despite pain. Virtual reality therapy can offer a 'dress-rehearsal' - to practise Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and movement skills, to support patients to have the courage to leave their homes and step into 'real-life'. It is also of benefit as it fits in with the participants who have other commitments eg work, looking after a relative or other dependents, school run, etc which makes it impossible to access standard treatment as usual. We aim to explore the experiences of 6 patients during their journey through a 12-week pain management programme delivered using Virtual reality and facilitated by a semi-automated mentoring device (SAMI). An Interpretative Phemenological Analysis design will be utilised using semi-structured interviews. The verbatim transcripts of those interviews will be used as the data. Participants will be asked to keep a rolling diary of their experience across the 12-week programme - and to re-read this prior to the interview at the end. Participants will be recruited via the clinical pain rehabilitation team. They will complete a telephone triage and a VR screening tool. Participants will be interviewed 1-2 weeks post completing the programme. The session will be recorded and a transcript generated. Participant characteristics and chronicity of pain will be noted. Themes will be generated from the transcripts, and connections will be sought.