The National Institutes of Health Pain Consortium has selected 12 health professional schools as designated Centers of Excellence in Pain Education (CoEPEs). The CoEPEs will act as hubs for the development, evaluation, and distribution of pain management curriculum resources for medical, dental, nursing and pharmacy schools to enhance and improve how health care professionals are taught about pain and its treatment.

The new CoEPEs were selected by the NIH Pain Consortium after a contract solicitation process and review. The awardees are the University of Washington, Seattle; the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore; the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, Philadelphia; Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville; the University of Rochester, N.Y.; the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Boston; the University of Alabama at Birmingham; the Thomas Jefferson University School of Medicine, Philadelphia; the University of California, San Francisco; the University of Maryland, Baltimore; and the University of Pittsburgh. Many of the new CoEPEs will build curricula across several of their health professional schools

The is a cooperative effort of the entire Pain Consortium, where the sponsors of this initiative are National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA): Lead; Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR), National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR), National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), National Institute on Aging (NIA), Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) and the Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH).

Please see the NIH press release and Request for Proposal for more details.

Update: Kick-Off Meeting held on July 10-11, 2012 in Bethesda, MD. Photo and list of participants available here.