From Post-Operative to Chronic Pain: Insights from Registry-Based Findings in South Africa, Germany and Australasia

David Holloway joined the electronic Persistent Pain Outcomes Collaboration (ePPOC) as Director in May 2022, after an extensive career in both the public and private sector, most recently as Director of Quality and Safety for an Australian community nursing and aged care organisation. ePPOC has been collecting pain outcomes data for more than a decade across Australia and New Zealand and is currently progressing towards the third iteration of its dataset. 

David has held a varied range of operational management and clinical governance roles covering both face-to-face and telehealth delivery models and completed his PhD thesis on the efficacy of virtual environments in increasing competence and confidence of nursing students in relation to medication administration.

Winfried Meissner was appointed Head of Jena University Hospital’s Pain Unit in 1994, and Head of the Palliative Care Department in 2009. The Pain Unit covers all areas of pain management (acute pain service, outpatient service unit, inpatient consultation service, multimodal pain management program, interdisciplinary pain conference). Meissner and his group have initiated two large pain registries, QUIPS in Germany and PAIN OUT international, to improve postoperative pain management and to facilitate health service research. These projects resulted in more than 100 publications, including a couple of landmark papers. He was coordinator of European Commission funded IMIPainCare and subproject PROMPT (Providing Standardized Consented PROMs for Improving Pain Treatment).

In 2020, Winfried received the Robert G. Addison Award by the American Academy of Pain Medicine.

Winfried was President of the German Pain Society from 2021-2022 and Past President from 2023-2024. He is member of several national and international societies including ESAIC and IASP.

Winfried volunteers with the Johanniter Unfallhilfe (St John Ambulance), a humanitarian organisation affiliated with the Brandenburg Bailiwick of the Order of St John. Recently, he  raised funding for PAMELA, a project aiming to prevent and treat phantom limb pain in Ukraine.

Winfried is married and has five children.

Dr. Pfister is a Specialist Anaesthetist at the UCT Department of Anaesthesia and Perioperative Medicine and the Lead Anaesthetist at Mowbray Maternity Hospital. 

She is also a mom of two beautiful daughters. She is a compassionate, energetic, and dedicated anaesthetist with a passion for teaching, research, and clinical excellence.

She has interests in obstetric anaesthesia, paediatrics, pain management, and is an advocate for working mothers in healthcare. 

She is an active contributor to research with multiple publications and a strong record of mentorship and service improvement.

Jess is a specialist anaesthetist at Groote Schuur hospital in Cape Town.

Having training in the UK, worked in Australia and specialised in South Africa Jess has seen the healthcare inequalities between countries first hand. She is passionate about improving the patient experience and is a big believer that compassion improves patient outcomes. She can recommend the book "Compassionomics" if you need scientific proof.

Jess's research interests lie in acute pain, obstetrics and healthcare education. Clinically she enjoys being a generalist, but particularly enjoys her work at Red Cross children's hospital and working with other mothers in obstetrics.

Ruth Zaslansky, DSc. Trained as a pain neurophysiologist. Currently Scientific Director of PAIN OUT, an international quality improvement and research network working to improve management of postoperative management.  PAIN OUT has been involved in many projects in low resource countries – working with local healthcare providers to assess  pain-related patient reported outcomes, treatments for post-operative pain and implement quality improvement projects.  In IASP, Ruth is secretary of the Pain Registry SIG.