GRANTS MADE 2004

Harvard Medical School Fund, Boston, Ma, "Neuro-Visual Symposium"
A one-year grant of $500. Support was given for the symposium held on April 22.
Contact: Shirley Wray, Harvard Medical School, Unit for Neuro-visual Disorders at the MGH.

Village Center for Care Fund, New York, NY, "Cross-Institution Pain Management Initiative"
A grant of $62,500 representing the final payment of a total two-year grant of $100,000 to support the "Pain Management Initiative" as part of an innovative model of care that addresses the pain needs of elderly and AIDS populations. This program is part of a new design to deliver nursing home care that includes small congregate care units located in home-like settings. Contact: Patricia Cafferty and Ellen Flaherty
Web Site: http://www.vcny.org/mission_statement.html

Departments of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, Emergency Room Medicine and Pediatrics, University of California at Davis, "Utilization of the Emergency Department by Chronic Pain Patients to Obtain Pain Medications: A Study of Barriers to Treatment, Abusive Behaviors and Psychological Factors"
A grant of $108,136 representing the final payment of a two-year grant of $216,272. This research project hopes to address the core barriers to treating pain in the emergency department. It will: help gather qualitative and quantitative evidence on the prevalence of components of the problem of adequately treating pain in the ED; gather data on the beliefs and perceived barriers to care in the ED from the perspectives of patients and clinicians; and correlate a test that could easily be applied by clinicians to help them feel more effective and less vulnerable in the care of patients in pain. Contacts: Scott Fishman, Barth Wilsey, Amy Ernst, and Margie Crandall
Web Site: http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/pain/

McGill University, Anesthesia Research Unit, Montreal, Ontario, "Development of analgesics for treatment of chemotherapy-evoked painful peripheral neuropathy."
A grant of 111,234 representing the first payment a two-year grant in the amount of $222,467.50 to support a research project. Contact: Gary Bennett
Web Site: http://www.mcgill.ca/dentistry/research/bennett/

Dalhousie University Foundation, Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) "Strategic Training Initiative in Health Research Devoted to Pain in Child Health (PICH)"
A grant of $39,900 (US) representing the first payment of a three-year grant for a total amount $119,700. To create the "Mayday Pain in Child Health" network of international trainees who participate in the Canadian Strategic Training Initiative, which is the only known training network in pediatric pain ­ worldwide. The strategy behind the Canadian initiative is to create a network of pediatric pain researchers and practitioners, which extends beyond the limits of any particular institution. Mayday was asked to contribute to the support of international participants as the CIHR guidelines allow only for support of Canadians. Contacts: Patrick McGrath, Bonnie Stevens, Allen Finley, Ken Craig, Celeste Johnson, Carol von Baeyer
Web Site: http://www.dal.ca/~pich/

ECRI, Plymouth Meeting, Pa, "A Systematic Review of the Use of Opioids to Treat Chronic Non-Cancer Pain"
A grant of $250,000 for Phase I and II of a project to prepare a three-part systematic review on opioids for chronic, non-cancer pain during 2005. Phase I was a planning grant. Phase II includes three parts; the first is a systematic evaluation of the quality of the available systematic reviews, evidence reports, and research articles on the efficacy and effectiveness of opioids. The second part seeks to determine which barriers to treatment patients most commonly encounter. The third part is to determine how law and/or regulation have influenced access to opioids. The project will also convene leading scientists to describe the limitations of existing studies of the effectiveness of opioids and to recommend an agenda for future research. In addition it will use a variety of methods to inform persons who make clinical and regulatory policy about the findings of the systematic review. Because of the unique breadth of the project, an historian has been commissioned to document it and then describe it in a publication. The Mayday Fund is collaborating with the Milbank Memorial Fund and the Center for Evidence-Based Policy of the Oregon Health and Science University. Contact: Jeffrey C. Lerner
Web site: http://www.ECRI.org

The University of Washington, Department of Anesthesiology, Seattle, WA, "Towards An Understanding of Pain-Suffering: Qualitative and Quantitative Examination"
A one-year grant of $69,000.The concept of pain-related suffering is important to medicine, but it is surprisingly ill defined. Marked differences exist in conceptualizations and features attributed to pain-related suffering. Preliminary efforts with samples of people with chronic pain, pain-free individuals, health care providers, and members of the clergy have identified six domains associated with pain-related suffering; namely, physical, emotional, social, self-control, time, and meaning. The primary objective of the current project is to build on preliminary work to develop an instrument that will enable assessment of pain-related suffering and that will permit evaluation of this construct in representative samples of people with different chronic pain diseases and syndromes. This will entail a series of stages including conducting focus groups, instrument development and refinement, establishing the psychometric properties of the assessment tool, and the dissemination of the results. Comments received during the initial work suggest that there is educational potential in using these procedures to sensitize health care providers to their own attitudes and beliefs about people with chronic pain. Methods to facilitate education about pain-related suffering will be explored. Contact: Dennis Turk

American Academy of Nursing, The Building Academic Geriatric Nursing Capacity Coordinating Center, Washington, DC
A total grant of $60,000 for 2 years in support of the project, "Mayday Fund Scholarships for Research on Pain." This project represents collaboration with the John A. Hartford Foundation to increase interest in scholarship among nurses that addresses pain in geriatric medicine. Contacts: Claire Fagin and Patricia Franklin
Web site: http://www.geriatricnursing.org/applications/

Lancaster General Hospital, Lancaster, Pa "Pursuit of Excellence in Pain Management"
A one-year grant in the amount of $20,000 to support the educational initiative, "Pursuit of Excellence in Pain Management." Contact: Norma Ferdinand
Web Site: http://www.lancastergeneral.org/

Brown University, Center for Gerontology and Health Care Research, Providence, Rhode Island, "Web Based Resources to Aide Nursing Homes in Improving Pain Management"
A grant of $81,803 representing the first payment in a two-year grant in the amount of $178,247 to support the project, which will make available tools and resources to better address the care of pain in nursing homes. Contact: Joan Teno
Web Site: http://www.chcr.brown.edu/Contents.htm

Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Department of Neurology, Baltimore, MD, "Curriculum Materials Support"
A grant of $79,810 to create educational materials that will enhance the impact of a curriculum initiative and that will promote dissemination of this curriculum to other medical schools in the Baltimore-Washington region and throughout the country. Resources provided by the Mayday Fund will be used to create integrated slide sets, video interviews on CDROM, an annotated teaching manual, a pocket reference guide and a student's workbook that will make this curriculum especially appealing to students and readily adaptable to other institutions. The emphasis of this curriculum will be to provide young physicians with the knowledge, skills and abilities they need to act at the bedside to reduce pain, eliminate barriers to treating pain, diagnose common pain syndromes and anticipate pain-related complications. It will include special emphasis on pain emergencies, pain in pediatric and non-verbal populations and pain as a clinical challenge relevant to all physicians regardless of specialty. Contact: Beth Murinson

NYRAG (New York Regional Association of Grantmakers), $750
Web Site: http://www.nyrag.org/

The Council on Foundations, $2,410
Web Site: http://www.cof.org/

Program Related Project

The Mayday Pain & Society Fellowship: A Media & Policy Initiative is designed to equip physicians, nurses, social workers, scientists, and ethical and legal scholars with the skills to become effective advocates and spokespeople about pain issues in the United States. The Fellowship was established to build a community of experts in the pain management field that can effectively communicate to the public and policymakers.

The Mayday Fund's Trustees approved the new three-year fellowship program in September 2003. Eighteen fellows will be chosen over the three-year period. The Fellowship is steered by an advisory committee made up of some of the nation's leading experts in the pain management field.
Contact: Carol Schadelbauer, Burness Communications
Web Site: http://www.burnesscommunications.com/

CONTACT THE MAYDAY FUND

For all initial or new contacts please send an e-mail to:
Christina Spellman, Executive Director
inquiry@maydayfund.org

Mail and phone contacts ONLY after initial email communication.
(Note this is an updated address.)

The MAYDAY FUND
c/o SPG
136 West 21st Street, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10011

THE MAYDAY FUND

Executive Director:
Christina Spellman