The latest RACGP report reveals what patients living with chronic pain need most and highlights the growing gap between those needs and what the current system can deliver.
We recently read the latest RACGP report exploring what patients living with chronic non-cancer pain want from their GPs. Patients are asking for more time, more empathy, and more joined-up care.
For us, the report’s findings reignited a question we’ve been asking for a while now:
Are we asking too much from GPs in this space?
The findings echo what we hear every day from people living with persistent pain and from the clinicians trying to help them. But anyone who has worked in primary care knows how these requests collide with the reality of a waiting room full of competing needs and the constant pressure of everyday practice.
Because perhaps the real question isn’t why GPs aren’t meeting those expectations.
It’s whether they even have a system that makes meeting any one of those patient needs possible.
What the RACGP report reveals:
Published in the Australian Journal of General Practice (September 2025), the RACGP’s qualitative analysis of Chronic Pain Australia’s National Pain Survey gives voice to over 2,000 Australians living with chronic non-cancer pain.
Five recurring themes emerged around what patients most value in their GP care:
- Effective treatment – Patients valued GP expertise, appropriate medications, diagnostic access, and clear pathways for long-term management.
- Communication skills – They wanted to be listened to, believed, and included in decisions about their care.
- Therapeutic relationship – Empathy, validation, and the absence of judgement mattered as much as prescriptions.
- Patients as experts – Respondents emphasised that their lived experience of pain held equal importance to clinical knowledge.
- Mental health matters – People described the profound emotional impact of persistent pain and the need for their psychological wellbeing to be recognised alongside the physical.
The overall theme here is clear: people living with chronic pain want care that integrates listening, learning, and long-term partnership.
And yet, the same survey highlighted how these needs remain unmet. Patients described short consultations, difficulty accessing physiotherapy or psychology, and the cost and confusion of navigating fragmented systems.
The RACGP authors themselves concluded that there is “a critical need to raise GPs’ awareness about the expectations and unmet needs of people living with chronic pain” and that effective management requires “a collaborative working alliance between medical and allied-health professionals.”
The gap between what patients want and what the system provides is widening and both sides are paying for it.
The system in practice
GPs are operating within a structure built for acute care, not for the deep complexity of chronic pain. They move between ear infections, blood-pressure checks, and mental-health reviews – all within a timeframe that does not allow for the attention chronic pain really requires to shift.
When the RACGP urges GPs to “stay up to date” and integrate biopsychosocial approaches, it makes clinical sense but it’s not realistic within the current structure of general practice.
This isn’t about capability or compassion. It’s about capacity.
The current system asks one clinician to deliver what should require a team to do. A team that can share language, reasoning, and responsibility for both the physical and emotional dimensions of pain.
The reality is that GPs are doing their best inside a system that was never built for the complexity of chronic pain – an invisible disease that touches every part of a person’s life, not just their body.
Multidisciplinary Is NOT the same as Interdisciplinary
These two terms are often treated as interchangeable. But when the wrong model drives care, patients feel the consequences – unheard, invalidated, and forced to manage their pain journey on their own.
In a multidisciplinary model, each professional contributes their expertise in isolation. The GP manages medication. The physiotherapist addresses movement. The psychologist supports coping. The patient becomes the messenger retelling their story, chasing reports, and trying to hold the pieces together.
An interdisciplinary model works differently. Communication isn’t incidental; it’s embedded in the processes and system. Professionals share notes, reasoning, and goals. They challenge each other’s assumptions and co-design treatment plans. The patient tells their story once and from there every clinician works from that shared understanding towards the same goal.
The RACGP findings make the cost of this confusion painfully clear. Patients described feeling like “project managers” of their own health, carrying information between disconnected professionals.
As CPM faculty member and pain coach Amie Rule reflects — herself a long-term pain sufferer and author of Breaking the Rules of Pain…..
“I wish my practitioners worked together instead of me doing trial and error and navigating it myself. That was the hardest thing… If I’d had these resources earlier, I believe I would’ve got better quicker, and it may not have led to such a significant diagnosis such as fibromyalgia.”
Amie’s insight gives us perspective from both sides of the fence – she lives the patient experience and now supports others through it as a pain coach. At The Chronic Pain Method (CPM), we call the alternative TRUE Interdisciplinary Care a practical framework that changes how clinicians work together and forms the foundation of everything we teach.
Beyond professional hierarchies
One of the most persistent barriers to interdisciplinary care is the professional hierarchy that is very prevalent in Australian healthcare.
Traditionally, medicine sits at the top of the hierarchy, while allied health remains positioned as support rather than partnership. Nowhere is this clearer than in chronic pain care, where physiotherapists are still too often treated as “the exercise prescribers” – valued, but excluded from diagnosis and decision-making.
This isn’t about ego or blame. It’s about legacy. Our system was built around a medical model that privileges prescription and procedure over communication and collaboration. Yet the RACGP report – and many patient stories – make it clear that collaboration and communication are exactly what patients are missing.
When clinicians are trained to work within a TRUE interdisciplinary method, their role expands far beyond exercise. They become interpreters of patient experience, facilitators of reflective dialogue, and partners in emotional regulation – the very qualities patients say they need most.
True interdisciplinary care isn’t about shifting power it’s about expanding thinking in the system. When medicine, psychology, and allied health work together as equals, each bringing their own expertise, patients finally experience care that feels coherent and compassionate.
The solution framework:
The Five Pillars of The Chronic Pain Method
The RACGP report didn’t just expose the flaws in chronic pain management. It described the exact conditions CPM was built to address. Every unmet need the study identified sits at the centre of our framework – five pillars that turn collaboration, reflection, and evidence into daily practice.
1. True Interdisciplinary Method
TRUE Interdisciplinary Practice removes the burden of fragmented care by designing communication into the structure of treatment. Clinicians, counsellors, and psychotherapists work from the same page. Treatment planning is transparent. Conversations are ongoing. Patients understand what they have signed up for and feel validated heard and more hopeful.
2. Supervision in Three Tiers
Empathy and communication were central themes in the RACGP study, alongside the call for clinicians to “stay up to date.” That kind of competence doesn’t happen by chance it needs structure.
Our Supervision Pillar provides that structure through self-reflection, peer review, and one-on-one supervision. It’s how clinicians refine their clinical reasoning, maintain empathy under pressure, and guard against burnout.
3. Education and Research
Patients said they want effective, evidence-based treatment – not just medication. They want clinicians who understand the psychological dimensions of pain.
Our Education Pillar bridges that gap by teaching the latest pain science and psychologically informed practice, based on evidence and lived experience. Every lesson uses research to teach different skills.
4. Community and Membership
The report highlighted communication as both a valued skill and an unmet need. That’s not just a patient issue; it’s a clinician one. Isolation is not conducive to clinical reasoning and clear minds.
Our Community Pillar provides the professional belonging that keeps our clinicians engaged and sharp. We meet, reflect, and learn together, honing their communication skills through shared dialogue rather than trial and error.
5. Referral and Network
Access – or lack of it – was one of the RACGP report’s findings. Patients wanted referrals to allied-health professionals and pain specialists, but cost and coordination barriers left them stranded.
CPM’s Referral and Network Pillar fixes exactly that. We’re building an ecosystem of trained practitioners who speak the same language and share the same framework. For patients, care continues without starting over. For clinicians, it means they’re never working blind.
Each pillar is powerful alone, but together they change everything.
This is what chronic pain care looks like when there is a system when every clinician, in every discipline, works from the same foundation.
Making it work what’s possible
If you’re a GP reading that RACGP report, you’d be wondering how on earth you’re meant to meet all those expectations and still keep up with practice demands.
Patients want more time, empathy, validation, collaboration, and mental-health support and they deserve it. But how do you deliver that kind of care within the time restraints of primary care? How do you provide the kind of joined-up, person-centred care the report calls for when you’re already managing the business, the paperwork, and the never-ending list of patients waiting to be seen?
And for our allied-health colleagues, the pressure isn’t lighter. You read that same report and feel the same overwhelm – patients need deeper, more connected care – but where do you find the time, the money, the staff, or the team to make it happen? You’re already filling diaries, chasing reports, and trying to hold your own world together. You know you need more knowledge and support, but there’s no clear way to build that into your everyday work.
Patients have real and urgent needs, and they deserve to have them met. But to truly meet those needs, we must also recognise and respond to the unmet needs of clinicians. Because without supported clinicians, there can be no sustainable patient care.
That’s the gap The Chronic Pain Method fills.
Inside CPM, clinicians aren’t told to work harder. They’re given a framework that changes how they work….together. Reflective supervision replaces isolation. Shared reasoning replaces guesswork. Interdisciplinary structure replaces the pressure to do it all alone.
In our programs, clinicians say they feel understood, backed by a team that works with them, not against them. The problems don’t disappear, but the load shifts. For the first time, they have the structure, language, and team to hold what chronic pain really is not just the symptoms, but the story, the emotion, and the human complexity behind it.
This is what the RACGP report was really pointing to not more study, not more work, not more pressure. What’s needed is more connection.
And that’s exactly what CPM builds.
So, back to the question we started with:
Are we asking too much of GPs?
Probably. But the point isn’t about whether GPs are doing enough – it’s about recognising that the expectations in the report can’t be met by any one profession alone.
What if, instead of asking individual clinicians to stretch even further, we built the kind of collaborative structure that allows every part of the care team to go deeper? A structure that extends treatment plans, connects disciplines, and makes it possible to meet those unmet needs together.
That’s what The Chronic Pain Method delivers: an interdisciplinary, no-hierarchy method of care that meets the needs of both patients and clinicians. If you’re a clinician who’s felt the strain of working alone, or a practice ready to expand what’s possible in chronic pain care, we invite you to join us.
