Academic Profile: Dr Chinonso Igwesi-Chidobe
Targeting chronic back pain by addressing biological, psychological and social factors
Dr Igwesi-Chidobe describes her research career, from paediatric physiotherapy to working with the United Nations on global health management.
Can you tell us a bit about your background, and how your research interests developed?
Having had an interest in health from a young age, I started my career as a clinical physiotherapist in a teaching hospital, working in different units and eventually specialising in paediatric physiotherapy after several years.
I completed my master’s in public health while I was a clinician and was able to combine the fields of physiotherapy and public health. I started my academic journey combining teaching with doing research, including completing a PhD at King's College, London, focusing on physiotherapy and global health, extending the frontiers of my previous public health experience to a global perspective looking at chronic pain and disease, disability and rehabilitation, and considering the biological, psychological and social aspects from a health management perspective.
Dr Chinonso Igwesi-Chidobe
While I was doing my PhD at King’s College London (and was still affiliated with the University of Nigeria), I got an opportunity to work for some months at the World Health Organization (WHO) headquarters office in Geneva, in a unit where they make regulations that can be applied globally on how to implement community-based rehabilitation strategies to improve functioning across different conditions. This helped me consolidate all the experiences I had to that point as a community-centred rehabilitation and global health expert. I joined the University of Bradford after 12 years in academia across UK and Nigeria, and attaining the position of Reader/Associate Professor in Community Physiotherapy, Rehabilitation and Global Health at the University of Nigeria.
How did this inform your research projects?
We developed a programme, the Good Back Programme (GBP) that was designed for rural African populations that are living with chronic low back pain. We know that the major contributor to disability across the whole world is low back pain, it's very expensive and is also a major contributor to chronic pain, and in Africa there's huge inequality between urban and rural populations and of course the burden of disease lies with the poorer in society.
The programme we developed is a complex biopsychosocial intervention, which addresses the biological aspect of the chronic low back pain, but also the psychological and social factors that drive disability and pain which we identified over several years through observational and interventional studies.
We found that this multi-component intervention really worked and we are looking at a much bigger trial which will hopefully get submitted early next year, the Good Back Programme Nigeria (GBP-Nigeria). What I am working on now is the Good Back Programme UK (GBP-UK), with an initial NIHR development grant to develop collaborations with communities living with back pain, grassroots community organisations and collect initial data to align our research plans with community needs and with NHS priorities.
This is important and necessary work as within the UK, black communities are particularly affected by this issue: black people have the greatest burden of chronic pain when you consider prevalence, severity and disability; and black people are also the most likely to report poor treatment experiences due to communication issues and suboptimal treatment recommendations.
There seems to be a gap in culturally sensitive NHS pain management programmes, and this is something we’re hoping to address by including the experiences of individuals and community organisations.
Dr Igwesi-Chidobe presenting details of the Good Back Programme
What are the next steps?
We're doing a systematic review to try to see how we can use digital interventions in a way that promotes equity instead of reducing it. I have a lot of international reviewers across several countries that are assisting with that, and I am also collaborating with the Centre for Digital Innovations in Health and Social Care at the University of Bradford in completing this review.
This current NIHR project makes up 50% of my time for 12 months, ending on the 31st May 2026 and the plan is that I'll have robust evidence as part of my report for the substantive NIHR grant application to be submitted mid 2026. We’re excited at the opportunity to work with a range of partners on this current project and the planned significantly larger project, including community organisations, NHS trusts within Birmingham, Leeds and London, UK and Australian universities including the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre and the Clinical Trials Research Unit which are both at the University of Leeds.