About Dr Nick Penney

I practice a ‘stepped care’ Integrative approach. Stepped care is an evidence-based approach to treating pain, identifying a number of different steps that might be required to resolve your pain, but only taking as many steps as necessary. Integrative care is a way of treating people that combines different proven methods, from a range of different clinical disciplines, into one unified plan. Chronic pain does not respond to single-treatment approaches (termed mono-therapies). My approach is to focus on your needs and provide a clear understanding of what we need to work on together, to allow you to recover.

Clinical pain conditions don’t just involve feeling pain. Pain interrupts how you feel emotionally (such as fear or anxiety), your sleep, energy levels, and mood (such as depression). This makes it harder to do and enjoy everyday activities, including work, socializing and other personal tasks. Once this is understood, it becomes clear that a single pill, injection or physical treatment is not going to work.

I have been practising and teaching mindfulness for over 20 years and have been fortunate to have been taught to teach a range of mindfulness programmes by some of the world’s leading authorities, including Professor Mark Williams (director of the Mindfulness Centre at Oxford University, now retired) and the creators of the dot b and paws.b courses (see Why Mindfulness page for more information). I have taught mindfulness extensively in New Zealand, Australia, the UK and Thailand, and an accredited teacher trainer for The Mindfulness in Schools Project UK. I have also been an accredited provider of continuing medical education (CME) for the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners, providing a number of “mindfulness for medical practitioners” programmes.

The research now tells us which aspects of mindfulness exercises work best in pain, or mood disturbance. Again, a ‘blanket approach’ doesn’t work, we need to understand which area of the brain we are targeting, and why.

In addition to my Mindful Health practice which specializes in pain management and rehabilitation, I also teach groups, individuals, medical practitioners, families and businesses and the courses can be adapted into ‘taster’ sessions, day workshops or weekend retreats. I also use mindfulness extensively in my clinical practice as a pain specialist working with patients with chronic pain, bodily distress disorder, anxiety, depression and many other chronic mental and physical health problems. This can be done in the clinic, or I have also taught people successfully using Skype, FaceTime and other video conferencing programs.

I formerly ran a pain clinic in Auckland offering a biopsychosocial approach to pain management (which was the subject of my PHD) and multi-modal treatment including mindfulness. Our results, based on patient-centred outcomes, were consistently the highest across all of the pain services subscribed to the Electronic Persistent Pain Outcomes Collaboration, part of the Australian Health Outcomes project. This led at one point to one of the Australian administrators commenting that many of our patients were exiting our service no longer meeting the definition of patients with persistent pain.

This biopsychosocial approach to pain management is at the centre of Mindful Health’s practice in Christchurch. We also offer a range of training courses and other educational offerings, including free presentations introducing mindfulness and its benefits.

I have taught mindfulness courses to a wide range of organisations, most recently for Crank’d media in Auckland but including Henry Schein LTD, Heathlink, St Cuthbert’s College teaching staff, Auckland University of Technology & the RNZCGP. The impact of the Covid pandemic on the mental and physical wellbeing of the business community has been widely felt. As there is a vast array of benefits to mental and physical health, as well as cognitive enhancement and performance from the practice of mindfulness, there has never been a greater need for corporate mindfulness courses run by experienced teachers (who are few and far between). Talent retention, decreased sick leave and greater staff engagement can all result from introducing mindfulness training into an organisation. However, organisations also need to commit to running the programme and to provide ongoing support and incentives so that staff to stay engaged.

Dr Penney’s PhD Thesis

Understanding and addressing all the factors that contribute to our well-being or ill health was part of Dr Penney’s doctoral research at The Centre for National Research on Disability and Rehabilitation Medicine, The University of Queensland, awarded in 2009.

Mindful Health comes from the awareness and understanding of our own personal journey, not the story we tell ourselves about it, or the emotions connected to that experience.

This approach consistently produces some of the best objective patient outcomes of any specialist pain service across New Zealand and Australia.