A CV In Narrative

A more traditional CV can be found here.

Through my passion to better understand the complexities and multifactorial nature of pain, I began to realize that I could help many more people by educating other health professionals, who could then teach their colleagues and their patients.

This is why I started working with Project ECHO.

As I was developing curriculums for chronic pain, I became aware of so many other public health epidemics: opioid overdose, border health, first responder resiliency, health-related effects of climate change, and domestic violence and gun-related deaths. Through my work educating clinicians, I learned that medical professionals can help patients understand and work with the forces that shape and create these threats. While some epidemics subside, others require a complex prevention and harm reduction strategies matrix.

A timeline:

· In 2008, I began ECHO Pain and Opioid Management. That program was replicated by the Army’s and Navy’s Department of Defense, the Veteran’s Administration, the Indian Health Service, and the Ministry of Health in Canada, along with 65 other countries

· In 2011, I opened the first Interdisciplinary Pain Center in New Mexico—the Largest in the Southwest. Our Pain program won the American Pain Society Clinical Center of Excellence Award for its size and interprofessional components.

· In 2012—after months of daily grit and determination—Senate Bill 215 passed unanimously in the NM legislature. That Bill required continuing education specific to chronic pain education. This was the only state in the US at the time to mandate pain education to all clinicians without exceptions. Due to the growing opioid crisis in New Mexico (#1 in the US due to heroin overdose), this was a landmark decision. It helped to lower opioid prescriptions due to improved knowledge of comprehensive pain management.

· From 2011-2013 I hosted Army and Navy physicians, officers, medics, and techs in Albuquerque every 3 months. I trained them on pain best practices and helped them prepare to launch their own global ECHO Pain program. I traveled to Fairbanks, Alaska, Portsmouth, VA, Washington DC, and Ft. Bragg, North Carolina to visit several Army and Navy Bases. The Department of Defense successfully launched Army and Navy Pain ECHOs in the US, Asia, and Europe. They are still operating today.

· In March of 2020—as Senior Associate Director of Project ECHO and Director of the New Mexico program team—I began 10 virtual COVID-19 programs within 3 weeks of the start of the pandemic. Three of these programs are currently still meeting at least twice a month. These programs have reached thousands of attendees from around the globe.

· In January 2021, I started the Climate Change and Human Health ECHO – a program that is very special to me. Raising my kids in New Mexico and on the Rio Grande, I was a direct witness to the extreme heat and increasing drought conditions that seemed to worsen every year. Urban heat islands and poverty shaped the lives of so many in the Albuquerque area—it was not difficult to see how climate change was taking a toll on the health of the community.

I took a Yale School of Public Health Climate Change Certificate course. As a result of that course, I realized I could begin an ECHO program to improve the communication skills of health professionals when it came to climate change. Since the beginning of this initiative, over 6,000 health professionals have attended these programs from all 50 states and over 45 countries.

In 2023, I began a Violence Prevention and Gun Safety program due to the epidemic of gun-related suicides and homicides in the United States and the fact that gun deaths are the number one cause of death for children ages 1-18 years. My Project ECHO team has conducted 16 sessions and educated hundreds of health professionals from over 30 states on topics that include domestic violence, suicide, substance use, red-flag laws, and safe storage.   

In March 2024, I was awarded the Society for Public Health Education Clarence E. Pearson Program Excellence Award – for Outstanding Contribution by a program to the practice of Health Education. The work recognized my work on health issues that have been created and exacerbated by climate change.

“Pain is whatever the experiencing person says it is, existing whenever and wherever the person says it does”

Margo McCaffrey, RN