Presenters
Michelle Wilson
Michelle Wilson works as a physiotherapist at Hunter Integrated Pain Service, a public tertiary referral pain service located in Newcastle, working with people experiencing complex chronic pain. Before this she worked in various physiotherapy roles across Hunter New England Health including many rural assignments to places such as Moree, Cowra, Warialda, Inverell, Kurri Kurri and outreach cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation service provision through the Rural Rehabilitation Program. Michelle has also worked as a Clinical Trials physiotherapist at Hunter Medical Research Institute studying chronic respiratory diseases. Throughout her career, Michelle had always gravitated towards, and reflected on, those challenging patients other therapist tried to avoid. This naturally lead her to explore the field of Pain Physiotherapy. Michelle has been employed at Hunter Integrated Pain Service for 7 years and has contributed to the design and delivery of the undergraduate physiotherapy Pain curriculum at the University of Newcastle. She is an author on a paper accepted and awaiting publication in a peer reviewed journal entitled Prioritizing a sequence of short duration groups as the standardized pathway for chronic non cancer pain at an Australian tertiary multidisciplinary pain service: preliminary outcomes. Michelle was granted the title of APA Pain Physiotherapist in 2018 and has been accepted in the inaugural cohort for Specialisation Training Program in Pain Physiotherapy through the Australian College of Physiotherapist in 2019-2020.
Darren Doherty
Darren has been a senior clinician, team leader and researcher at the tertiary level Gold Coast Interdisciplinary Persistent Pain Centre since 2011. He is a Australian Physiotherapy Association titled Pain Physiotherapist and presently a pain specialisation registrar. Along with pain neuroscience and its clinical applications he has a keen interest in innovative health management solutions using technology and has been published in the use of telehealth to present pain management courses to rural and remote patients.
