The main goal of the Outreach Program (in Spanish PME) of MiNuSPain is to promote the outreach activities and exchange of information, not only to the scientific community, but also to industry, education and society.
We are dedicated to achieve an important and fluid communication of the work performed by Center, in order to educate and create awareness of chronic pain, to consolidate it on the public agenda that will lead to the establishment of public policies and guidelines that will help to fight chronic pain.
Our first project is OUCH, el juego del Dolor (the game of pain), aimed at children from 8th to 2nd grade. The game is a great tool to start scientific literacy at a young age.
For more information, visit our website: oucheljuego.cl or our instagram: @oucheljuego
Postgraduate student performing RT-qPCR from spinal cord tissue
Regarding the scientific community, our strategy is to generate high-impact publications in dedicated journals and the participation of our researchers in specialized conferences and meetings. Relevant to this last point, our researchers are active members of pain societies (International Association for the Study of Pain, IASP; Neuropathic Pain SIG, NeuPSIG; Asociación Chilena de Estudio del Dolor, ACHED) and they participate in the organization of their annual meetings.
To promote scientific work, we stimulate the use of preprint platforms such as bioRxiv, which allows free and rapid publication, and encourages scientific debate. Along with this, we will stimulate a culture of transparency and openness that promotes reproducibility.
Our outreach activities are targeted to two main groups: health professionals and the general audience. With the first group we have developed alliances with municipalities throughout the country, through their respective Health Departments, to organize scientists/clinicians round tables that allows open discussions that will help to propose clinically relevant questions that can be answered from fundamental science, for which we created the MiNuSPain bench to bedside series.
In order to reach young scientists, we have a MiNuSPain training program for undergraduate and graduate students and clinical residents, which includes an annual International Summer School, joint seminars, and international rotations. We are currently part of the organizing committee of 2 international schools of pain in Chile: the International School of Pain of the University of Heidelberg and the Latin American School of Pain IASP, and we are organizing the next Pain School with NeuPSIG in Chile.
Postgraduate student performing RT-qPCR from spinal cord tissue
