Life delivers unforeseen challenges that have the potential to push us to the limits emotionally, psychologically and physically. This session dived into chronic pain research conducted within claims, how that has improved claims management practice and quality of life for customers. SPEAKERS: Lorimer Moseley, professor, University of South Australia Simonie Fox, national wellbeing manager, AIA Australia Moderator: Laurence Parker-Brown, content producer, Conexus Financial View Simonie’s slide here

Key takeaways

• Pain coaching in a claims environment will shift control from the health and claims systems back to the customer
• Health professionals and the claims system have not caught up with current pain science
• Insurers spend significant sums on long-term TPD and IP claims related to chronic pain
• Claims staff are being trained to understand pain science. How they speak to a customer can dial up or reduce their pain experience.
• Pain is an evolutionary mechanism to protect the body but it is also an illusion and the brain can be trained to be less sensitive to it
• Subtle conversations between a case manager and client will help the process to recovery. The last message case managers want to give customers is that pain is not real – it’s all in their brain
• Pain coaching has seen an 80 per cent improvement in activity and 70 per cent improvement in mood for AIA Australia research participants, 93 per cent of them said it was worthwhile.