Differentiating the Causes of Persistent Soft Tissue Injuries Using Layered Multidimensional Pain Care

DR. BRENDA LAU is a Pain Specialist / Anesthesiologist practicing in Vancouver and Surrey, BC and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians & Surgeons of Canada (RCPSC) since 2004. In 2007, she became a  Fellow of the Faculty of Pain Medicine of the Australia & New Zealand College of Anaesthetists after completing a two year Pain Medicine fellowship and Master of Medicine degree in Sydney, Australia.

Since restarting her clinical practice in 2008 in Anesthesiology and Pain medicine, she led the development of the current Surrey based JPOCSC multidisciplinary pain clinic as medical director. After 2011, she became the first Chair of the FHA Region wide pain services division supporting the development of various acute and chronic pain services across 10 FHA hospital sites.

Brenda was a founder and board member of, and continues to contribute to, the Pain BC Society that formed in 2008.  She has also been involved in several provincial wide services including the Providence Health Care RACE Pain hotline, co-chaired the Pain Practice Support Program and helped create the BCWH Chronic Pelvic Pain program.

Brenda is passionate about helping people suffering from pain get access to the help they need.  This means improving the understanding of pain, improving pain treatments, and increasing opportunities for pain care training.   Hence,  In 2013, she co-founded a community based pain clinic called CHANGEpain to improve earlier access to effective MSP funded multidimensional pain care and enable pain research in QI, and practice based evidence.

To increase training opportunities for physicians, in 2008, she has been working with the national Royal College of Physicians & Surgeons of Canada as one of the Founding members of the subspecialty of Pain Medicine which was approved in 2013. In 2011 Brenda became the Chair of the UBC Pain Medicine Residency Committee.  

Since, 2014, she is part of the expert panel who developed and are now supporting the roll-out of the Northern Health Authority Pain Prevention & Management Program that aims to improve cross-disciplinary pain care from rural units to UHNBC Pain Center in Prince George.

Besides practicing at CHANGEpain, Brenda maintains her anesthesiology practice at the Surrey Memorial Hospital and her interventional pain management practice with the St. Paul’s Hospital Pain Center.