The Next Step After the 2026 ANZCA Pain Education Standards

The 2026 ANZCA Pain Education Standards are an important step forward in strengthening pain care across Australia.

They provide clear guidance on what high-quality pain management should look like, reinforcing the importance of person-centred care, multidisciplinary approaches, contemporary pain science, and the role of education.

There appears to be strong alignment across the sector on these principles, along with broad acceptance that continued investment in education and training is essential.

But what are the standards really driving?

Beyond the principles, the standards are also shaping something more practical: the behaviours expected in everyday care.

Across the six standards, a consistent set of behaviours emerges:

• Working collaboratively across disciplines

• Communicating clearly and consistently about pain

• Focusing on function, goals and self-management

• Reflecting on practice and adapting over time

• Understanding the individual experience of pain

• These are the behaviours that underpin high-quality care.

The Next Step

If the standards define what good looks like, the next step is ensuring those behaviours can be delivered consistently in practice.

While education and training are essential to building capability in pain management, translating these principles into consistent everyday practice remains a challenge — particularly in primary care, where time, access to multidisciplinary support, and coordination can all be limiting factors.

This is where the opportunity sits if we ask the question:

How do we make best practice the path of least resistance?

In busy clinical environments, behaviour is shaped by:

• workflow structure

• access to support how care is organised around the patient

• and, importantly, funding

When these are aligned, best practice becomes easier to deliver. When they’re not, even well-understood approaches can be difficult to apply consistently.

The Role of Frameworks

Well-designed care frameworks can play an important role here.

They can:

• provide structure across the patient journey that aligns with normal workflows

• support consistent communication and education

• enable genuine multidisciplinary input

• reduce fragmentation and coordination burden

• reinforce desired behaviours over time through shared learning and collaboration

Importantly, good frameworks don’t replace clinical judgement — they support it. They create an environment where clinicians can apply their expertise more effectively, share perspectives, and support one another, while maintaining flexibility to tailor care to the individual.

What This Means for Primary Care

For chronic pain, this has particular relevance. General practice already sits at the centre of care.

The opportunity now is to support practices with models that:

• embed education into care pathways

• enable coordination across providers and disciplines

• support patient engagement and self-management

• reduce the burden on individual clinicians

Our Perspective

At Pain Education and Management, this is the problem we’ve been focused on solving.

Our approach is designed to support patients through a structured pathway that, in turn, enables the behaviours the standards are promoting — by making those behaviours easier and a natural fit within existing workflows, particularly in primary care settings.

Because ultimately, improving pain care isn’t just about defining best practice. It’s about making it easier to deliver, every day.

The standards set the direction — the next step is building systems that make that direction achievable in practice. That’s exactly what the Pathways program is designed to support.