Pain management app is being developed for the Latino community

Wake Forest School of Medicine will receive a grant to study and develop non-pharmaceutical pain management interventions for the Latino community.

The app is called PainTRAINER and will include an eight-step pain management program. It's basically an in-person therapy simulation for cancer survivors. 

There is already an English version, but researchers say there is lack of support for the Latino community due to language barriers. North Carolina reported a 40% increase in drug overdose-related deaths in 2020 compared to the previous year and it is disproportionately impacting marginalized communities. 

Wake Forest School of Medicine professor Megan Bennett Irby is working with local organizations to develop PainTRAINER fully in Spanish with a $580,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health. 

"It started as this larger parent grant, and recognizing that we were unable to address really important concerns in our community because we were limited by language barriers," says Bennett Irby. "So we quickly put together this application working with community organizations — a lot of community groups — brought them to the table to find out if they would be supportive of developing a Spanish language program that is linguistically and culturally appropriate."

She says so far the team is working with organizations like the Hispanic League and similar groups.

It's expected that the app will be fully developed in Spanish by the end of 2024. 

This story was produced by a partnership between WFDD and La Noticia. You can read this story in Spanish at La Noticia.

Eileen Rodriguez is a reporter for both WFDD and La Noticia through Report for America, where she covers COVID-19's impact in the Latino Communities.

Periodista de La Noticia y 88.5 WFDD, Eileen Rodríguez reporta el impacto de COVID-19 en la comunidad Latina en Carolina del Norte. Rodríguez es miembro del cuerpo de periodistas de Report for America 2021-2022

href="https://www.reportforamerica.org/members/erlin-rodriguez/" target="_blank">Report for America 2021-2022