The specialty of Pain Medicine is the management of acute, persistent and cancer pain in patients. It involves the multi-disciplinary assessment of patients using the bio-psychosocial perspective model. Pain management may involve interventional nerve modular techniques, medication and rehabilitation.

1. Acute pain: post-operative, post-trauma, acute episodes of pain in medical conditions.
2. Chronic pain: including more than 200 conditions described in the International Association for the Study of Pain (‘IASP’) Taxonomy
3. Cancer pain: pain due to tumour invasion or compression, pain related to diagnostic or therapeutic procedures, pain due to cancer treatment

The Faculty of Pain Medicine CAI (the ‘Faculty’ or ‘FPM’), a faculty of the College of Anaesthesiologists of Ireland (the ‘College’ or ‘CAI’), is the educational organisation in Ireland for Specialists in Pain Medicine and for specialists in training (‘trainees’) and is directly responsible for the education and training of specialists in Pain Medicine in Ireland.

The Faculty provides a two-year training programme in Pain Medicine, undertaken in hospitals and clinical placements approved by FPM, leading to the specialist qualification of Certificate of Satisfactory Completion of Specialist Training (’CSCST’) in Pain Medicine.