Swedish quality registry for pain rehabilitation: purpose, design, implementation and characteristics of referred patients.

Objective: In order to facilitate comparisons of pain rehabilitation programmes in Sweden and to enable audit spirals for single programmes as well as outcome studies, the Swedish Association for Rehabilitation Medicine initiated a national quality registry in 1995.

Patients: Referred for rehabilitation due to pain-related disability.

Methods: The registry collects standardized self-reports before assessment, after rehabilitation and one year later, covering demographic, educational and psychometric data, pain intensity, physical disability and life satisfaction.

Incidence of long-term sick-listing in an urban area of Sweden and its relationship with demographic data of the population.

By checking the card indexes of seven out of twelve Social Insurance Offices covering 66% of the total wage-earning population in the city of Göteborg the patients recorded for 90 days of continuous sick-listing were classified into four diagnostic categories according to the doctor's certificate: "non-specific pain" and "specific pain" of the musculoskeletal system, "other pain" and "non-pain" diagnoses. The overall yearly incidence of 90 days' sick-listing averaged 5.4%.

A randomized prospective study of vocational outcome in rehabilitation of patients with non-specific musculoskeletal pain: a multidisciplinary approach to patients identified after 90 days of sick-leave.

This study was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of a multidisciplinary rehabilitation programme offered to a general population with 90 days of sick-leave due to non-specific musculoskeletal pain. The results concerning return to work and re-sick-listing during a follow-up period of five years were evaluated for Swedes and immigrants separately. Compared to a control group, the rehabilitation offer resulted in improved work stability after work return among the Swedes.

A comparative study of feelings, attitudes and behaviors of patients with fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis.

The purpose of this explorative study was to administer a battery of questionnaires related to a broad number of psychosocial factors in patients with fibromyalgia syndrome (FS). By doing this, psychological factors associated with the consequences of chronic pain in patients with FS could be identified and studied in more depth. Thirty-one patients with FS were compared to 30 patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) with regard to feelings about self, pain/ache preoccupation, support from significant others, psychosomatic symptoms, activities of daily living, job satisfaction, and future expectations.