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keywords
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Functional Abdominal Pain
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keywords
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Pain Prevention
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research overview
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Dr. Schurman is a practicing pediatric psychologist with expertise in the areas of both pain management and gastroenterology, having established and co-directed the Children’s Mercy (CM) Abdominal Pain Program (APP) for more than 20 years. She maintains an active clinical research program focused on understanding the interaction of psychosocial, inflammatory, and endocrine factors in the experience of chronic abdominal pain, with emphasis on developing strategies for pain prevention and early intervention that can be rapidly translated back into clinical care. It is noteworthy that the APP, a nationally recognized clinical program, is set up to allow every patient to be a research participant in some fashion, from retrospective reporting on naturalistic outcomes and trajectories of treatment response to prospective randomized clinical trials. This clinical research enterprise has led to a strong research pipeline and track record of publication and presentation, with more than 90 manuscripts published in peer-reviewed journals and more than 100 presentations at national or international meetings, as well as authoritative chapters on chronic abdominal pain for the Oxford Textbook of Pediatric Pain and the Handbook of Pediatric Psychology. She has been a PI or co-PI for several grant-funded projects. Over the past several years, she has worked on developing a collaborative research program that works to harness the heterogeneity of the population of youth with chronic functional abdominal pain to better understand and match treatment to the unique set of contributors in each clinical patient. This work holds considerable promise to revolutionize clinical practice by demonstrating proof of concept for individualized tailoring of evidence-based treatment packages in pediatric abdominal pain as an exemplar condition. Over the past decade, she has developed parallel expertise/experience in quality improvement methods, harnessing these tools to bring evidence-based pain prevention strategies into the clinical environment for both needle and non-needle procedures. She shares these skills and lessons learned with others within the healthcare field through her peer-reviewed publications and continuing education workshops nationally and internationally. Dr. Schurman served as the 2nd Editor-in-Chief of Clinical Practice in Pediatric Psychology, an official journal of the Society of Pediatric Psychology (Division 54 of the American Psychological Association) from 2017-2022. She currently serves as Quality and Service Excellence Champion and Director of Research for the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, & Nutrition.
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