Pain Management

Pain Management

Cancer Pain Guidelines

Cancer is a major source of morbidity and mortality. Besides being the leading cause of death in Singapore, the effects of being struck by cancer are often devastating to the individual and his or her family.

These guidelines should provide a welcome aid to doctors who manage patients with cancer. The key messages that are made in these guidelines are that cancer pain represents unnecessary suffering and cancer pain can be controlled in the majority of patients through relatively simple means.

Guidance is provided on evaluating cancer pain and the various options for treating it.

Doctor’s version guidelines
Patient’s version guidelines 

ID Pain

English version
Chinese version
Questionnaire

Pain Management and Guidelines

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About Me

Zheng Zhongxi
Council Member

Dr. Zheng Zhongxi is a Consultant Anaesthetist and Pain Medicine Specialist at the Department of Anaesthesia and Surgical Intensive Care Unit in Changi General Hospital. He completed his Anaesthesiology Residency in Singapore and pursued further subspeciality Chronic Pain training with a one-year Fellowship in Interventional Pain Medicine with the University of Toronto, Canada.

His areas of interest include Musculoskeletal and Interventional Pain Medicine. He is an advocate for patient-led care and places great emphasis on patient education and participation. He also believes in a multidisciplinary approach to chronic pain management, with exercise, mental health, and lifestyle modifications as core tenets to effective care.

About Me

Harinda Goonesekera
Council Member

Dr. Harinda Goonesekera is an Anaesthetist and Pain Management specialist who has a special interest in Interventional Pain Medicine. He is Senior Consultant and Head of Pain Services at Ng Teng Fong General Hospital. He graduated from the University of Colombo and received Anaesthesia and Pain training in Edinburgh.

About Me

Lim Lee Yen
Council Member

MBBS (Singapore), MRCP (UK), MMed (Int Med) Associate Consultant, Supportive Care & Palliative Medicine, Ng Teng Fong General Hospital

Dr. Lim Lee Yen is a palliative physician providing care for cancer and non-cancer patients. Her specialty interest involves working with multidisciplinary teams to manage total pain and other symptoms.

About Me

Nicholas Chua
Council Member

Dr. Nicholas Chua is the Medical Director and Senior Consultant, Pain Medicine and Anaesthesiology in Specialist Pain International Clinic, Mount Elizabeth Hospital, Singapore. He is the immediate past-President of the Pain Association of Singapore and is a long-standing FIPP Examination Board member. His subspeciality interest focuses on chronic neck pain and cervicogenic headache and he completed his Ph.D. on it with the Radboud University Medical Centre of Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

About Me

Lester Jones
Council Member

Lester Jones is a Senior Lecturer at the Singapore Institute of Technology. He is an Australian physiotherapist with post-graduate training in psychology and pain. He was the first physiotherapist to receive MScMed(PainMgt) from the University of Sydney’s Pain Management and Research Institute. He was the inaugural Chair of the National Pain Group, Australian Physiotherapy Association, and is the Research Officer on the IASP Special Interest Group, Pain associated with Torture, Organised, Violence and War. His scholarly interests revolve around improving pain literacy in health professionals covering areas including education, clinical reasoning, pain in survivors of torture, pain associated with childbirth and breastfeeding, and pelvic pain. He recently completed his Ph.D. with the Judith Lumley Centre, La Trobe University, exploring the utility and suitability for the Pain and Movement Reasoning Model, a clinical reasoning tool that he co-designed. He is currently in his second term on the PAS Council.

About Me

Darren Leong
Council Member

Dr. Darren Leong is a Senior Staff Registrar with CGH’s Sport & Exercise Medicine department; and has experience in providing medical coverage for sports events and organizations, such as local football matches, basketball tournaments, ATP Challenger (Tennis) events, the F1 Singapore Grand Prix and mixed martial arts. He has covered endurance events like triathlons and duathlons and was the Chief Medical Officer of the 2009 OSIM Singapore Triathlon. In multi-sport or larger-scale events, he was involved in the inaugural 2010 Youth Olympic Games in Singapore, the 2015 South East Asian Games, and the 2015 ASEAN Paralympics Games. Representing the country and serving our athletes culminated in Dr. Leong being appointed Chief Medical Officer for Team Singapore at the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games and the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics.

Close to his heart, he is active as Special Olympics Singapore’s Healthy Athletes medical doctor. Dr. Leong’s sporting interests lie in Tennis, Badminton, Wakeboarding, Ten-Pin Bowling, Floorball, Ultimate Frisbee, Sailing. He enjoys musical theatre and singing and has been in his church choir since young.

About Me

Prit Anand Singh
Honorary Secretary

Dr. Singh is a  Senior Consultant and Director of Chronic Pain Management Service at Dept of Anaesthesia and SICU at Changi General Hospital and a Clinical Asst Professor at Duke NUS Medical School, Singapore. He completed his post-graduate medical training from Edinburgh, Scotland, and is a Fellow of the Royal College of Anaesthetists and Faculty of Pain Medicine, United Kingdom since 2012. He came to Singapore in 2017 and has been involved with PAS since 2018.

His area of interest is long-term opioid therapy for chronic pain. He believes in the holistic and multidisciplinary management of chronic pain. Currently, he is working on setting up a transitional pain service, which would be the first one in Singapore. He has published widely and has been invited to present nationally and internationally on various topics related to the management of pain, regional anesthesia, and simulation.

In his free time, he likes to go for long walks, and occasionally cook fusion cuisine and mix complimentary cocktails.

About Me

Yang Su Yin
Council Member

Dr. Yang Su-Yin was awarded her Ph.D. in Academic Studies (Health Psychology) at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London, and accepted as a Chartered Health Psychologist by the British Psychological Society (BPS). She is currently practicing as a psychologist; specializing in pain management. Dr. Yang as a special research interest in healthcare innovations and is part of the co-learning faculty for the Centre for Healthcare Innovation (CHI). She has published articles in both health magazines and international journals and has peer-reviewed articles for journal publication. Out of work, Dr. Yang is a self-proclaimed Foodie with a love for all things handmade and a medium-bodied, single roast of decadence!

About Me

Wong Su Ren
Council Member

Wong Su Ren is an Assistant Professor at the Health and Social Sciences Cluster at Singapore Institute of Technology and a Principal Occupational Therapist at the National University Hospital. She pioneered the occupational therapy pain management service in NUH 2008 and continues to enjoy helping her patients get back to doing what the need to do and love to do through focusing on lifestyle modification and self-management.  She is also a certified life coach and passionate about research, mentoring, and education.

About Me

Poonam Pal
Council Member

Dr Poonam Pal is a Senior Physiotherapist at PROHEALTH PHYSIO FOCUS. She has worked in various public organisations including restructured hospitals in Singapore before moving to private practice. She has vast experience in musculoskeletal physiotherapy at the Accident & Emergency department and outpatient clinics. Her areas of expertise are in the assessment and management of spinal conditions and has a special interest in the assessment and management of chronic pain. Besides clinical practice she enjoys mentoring and teaching junior colleagues. In her free time, she enjoys leisure walks and practicing yoga.

About Me

Wendy Ng
Council Member

Wendy is a musculoskeletal physiotherapist with extensive experience managing a wide spectrum of adult, adolescent, and pediatric musculoskeletal pain conditions. She practices at Singapore Sport and Exercise Medicine Centre@ Novena with a focus on chronic and complex musculoskeletal pain. She is a Ph.D. candidate and Australian Government Research Training Program scholarship recipient with Curtin University and has published in international peer-reviewed journals. Her research interest is in improving understanding of the biopsychosocial nature of musculoskeletal pain and translating pain research into clinical practice. Outside of work, she is a mum to a preschooler boy and an avid runner.

About Me

Ho Kok Yuen
Council Member

Dr. Ho Kok Yuen practices at The Pain Clinic in Mt Alvernia Hospital. He is a consultant in anaesthesiology and pain medicine. He graduated from the National University of Singapore and completed his pain management fellowship at Duke University Hospital in North Carolina, USA. He is a Fellow of Interventional Pain Practice (FIPP) with the World Institute of Pain (WIP) and also serves as an examiner for the FIPP examinations.

About Me

Ming Goronovsky
Honorary Treasurer

Ming has been a member of the PAS since 2019. She currently works as a private practice physiotherapist at PhysioActive (Novena) and has specialized interests in pediatric pain, concussion, and musculoskeletal and sports injury management. She strongly believes that movement is medicine, and is passionate about educating patients and caregivers to advocate for themselves.

About Me

Angela Yeo
Vice President

Dr. Angela Yeo is a Senior Consultant Anaesthetist and Pain Medicine Specialist in the Department of Paediatric Anaesthesia, KKH. She is also the Clinical Director of the Children’s Pain Service and is passionate about improving paediatric pain in Singapore and in the region. She sits on the Council of the Pain in Childhood Special Interest Group of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) and is inaugurating the Asian Society of Paediatric Anaesthetists (ASPA) Paediatric Pain Special Interest Group in Nov 2021.

Her interests are in paediatric pain – acute, chronic, oncopalliative and procedural. In her free time, she enjoys playing board games and watching movies with her family and occasionally contemplates going to the gym.

About Me

Ong Say Yang
President

Dr Ong Say Yang is a consultant anaesthesiologist. He underwent a one-year fellowship in chronic pain management in Adelaide in 2018. His clinical interests are in pain management, regional and obstetric anaesthesia. He divides his clinical time between the National University Hospital and Alexandra Hospital.

When not providing pain relief or putting patients to sleep, he enjoys striking a few chords on his guitar or chasing the wind in his running shoes.

About Me

Ong Say Yang
President

Dr. Ong Say Yang is a consultant anaesthesiologist. He underwent a one-year fellowship in chronic pain management in Adelaide in 2018. His clinical interests are in pain management, regional and obstetric anaesthesia. He divides his clinical time between the National University Hospital and Alexandra Hospital.

When not providing pain relief or putting patients to sleep, he enjoys striking a few chords on his guitar or chasing the wind in his running shoes.