This news story is kind of alarming but goes along with our look at pain management in recent weeks here on the Nursing Show. This looks at deaths from pain killer overdoses tripling over the last decade an information released by CDC recently looking at prescription pain killers OxyContin, Vicodin and Methadone leading to the deaths of 15,000 people in 2008. That’s more than 3x the number of 4,000 deaths in 1999.
We’re talking about being aggressive with our pain management but we need to balance that with the long term effects of medication when they are used for long period of time. I think we can be aggressive in the acute pain stages and that’s I think I was kind of focusing on there but there are also concerns lead to have wait in here. The federal government in United States has enacted a plan for the states to begin doing more to track prescription drugs that are being abused and also coming up with the series of guidelines on prescriptions and how narcotics should be prescribed for acute pain. You know the saying, maybe just three days’ worth pain medication dispensed initially for acute pain with the idea that eventually the pain will lessen and the patient can move in to different types of pain management.
Again, this is why we’re talking about pain management because it really is about managing the pain and doing different things and doing what needs to be done at different stages in the pain process. There are some places have higher rates of abuse and deaths than others. New Mexico has the highest overdose death rate at 27 per 100,000. Nebraska the lowest at 5.5 per 100,000 and the national rate was 11.9 according to this article and the CDC report. More likely to be middle aged men, white and also American Indians and the prescription pain killers seemed to be highest in the southeast and the northwest.
We need to kind of look into how your area in your community fits in the problem. We need to develop some assessment tools I think to better assess patients that are perhaps drug seeking, shopping around for that prescription to manage their pain from place to place to place and find out and develop the tools and assessment skills needed and that maybe in nursing research project or something that you could put together to try to find a better way to assess where those patients are and to better tract those patients in such a way that it doesn’t violate HIPAA but allows for the next healthcare professional that encounters them to not just blindly give them what they want but find a way to get them what they need which is assistance with their addiction. I think in the healthcare setting there should be a way to do that without violating confidentiality but do it in such a way that allows the next healthcare professional to treat that patient better, more effectively because of the understanding of past history and not let the patient’s illness their addiction give them the automatic ability to mislead the next healthcare professional they go to. That’s something we need to really weigh and look at on whose benefits are we talking about here.
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This article has been featured in the news segment of the Nursing Show podcast episode Interview with Pain Management Nurse and Episode 200.
