Counseling Veterans with Chronic Pain During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Secondary Analysis of a Randomized Controlled Trial.

Introduction: Veterans with chronic pain could be vulnerable during the COVID-19 pandemic. We qualitatively explored the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on a sample of veterans receiving brief counseling focused on pain management in an ongoing clinical trial and discuss how the pandemic affected the process of motivating veterans with chronic pain to engage in interdisciplinary multimodal pain treatment at the Department of Veteran Affairs.

Methods: Segments of audio-recorded counseling sessions containing content about the pandemic were transcribed and coded to identify key concepts emerging from individual counselor-participant transactions.