About the Forum

The International Forum on Primary Care Research on Low Back Pain is the premier international conference on research on low back pain, with a focus on primary care. The goal of the Forum is to share the latest concepts, methods, and results in low back pain diagnosis, evaluation, treatment and work disability prevention.

Attendees include leading investigators with an interest in low back pain from the fields of primary care, occupational health and safety, physical therapy, rheumatology, psychology, osteopathy, chiropractic, and epidemiology with an interest in low back pain.

The Forum program includes keynote speakers, oral presentations, state of the art reviews, poster presentations and workshops organized around the conference themes and emerging issues. In order to maintain an intimate and interactive atmosphere attendance is restricted to less than 250 registrants.

Plans for Forum XI are well underway. This meeting will be structured around improving low back pain (LBP) outcomes, with an emphasis on better translation of research findings into practice and policy initiatives.

Melbourne LBP Forum Theme

The overarching theme of Melbourne LBP Forum IX will be how to ensure that research findings are better implemented into practice and are used to inform policy initiatives. There is a lot we know about back pain yet there continues to be an underestimation of the size of the public health burden at the public health policy level; a lack of uptake of best evidence-based practice in routine clinical care; ongoing disability in the workplace; and persistence of misconceptions and myths about back pain at both the societal and individual level.

Over the 3 days of the meeting we will address three broad sub-themes:

1. How can we translate evidence into public health policy?

• What is the global burden of back pain – what do we know, what are the gaps, how is it being measured?
• What do governments use to make decisions in allocating scarce resources?
• What current international policy initiatives are in place - are they effective, what are the lessons that have been learnt, what are the barriers to national policy initiatives for back pain and how can they be overcome?

2. How can we better translate evidence into clinical practice?

• How can we ensure that evidence does not get ‘lost in translation’?
• What are the barriers and enablers to implementation?
• What are the lessons that have been learnt from implementation studies and studies of complex interventions?

3. Making it ‘work’?

• Why is work disability escalating in some but not all settings and what are the modifiable risk factors?
• How can we get the message across that working is good for one’s health rather than harmful?
• Are there specific occupational groups that need more attention?
• How can we keep older workers at work?