Public Health: Countering Opioid Overdoses
Problem

The opioid epidemic is a severe public health crisis that must be attended to with urgency in the U.S. It has spread in due part to the problem of care providers over-prescribing strong and addictive opioids or pain relief to patients, who in turn become long-term opioid addicts (Brummett et al., 2017). Illegal opioids are also hitting the streets from other sources, compounding the problem; however, since many health care providers are unable to impact what happens on the streets (in terms of keeping drugs out of the country), they can make a difference by intervening in their facilities. It is true that patients have a right to expect pain relief, but the short-sightedness of health care professionals who prescribe opioids to patients is often a major setback for the fight against opioid abuse. One solution is to cut back on the strength of opioids prescribed to patients so that the goal is pain management (i.e., tolerating the pain) rather than total pain relief (i.e., zero pain). The goal should be to get the pain down to a level where the patient is able to stand it—not to make it disappear completely (Harbaugh et al., 2018). If too strong opioids are being prescribed, the patient can become a drug addict very easily because the feeling of no pain is highly addictive. Other problems like sleep apnea and severe depression can follow, however, causing the patient to feel that more drugs are needed to counterbalance these new issues (Rowsell et al., 2016). This it is a negative circle of patients feeling bad and doctors prescribing more drugs; patients feeling worse, and more drugs being given. Sooner rather than later, people end up overdosing on opioids, either on ones prescribed to them or on ones that they get illegally off the streets. The reason for the overdose is that they are hooked and are now substance abusers.

People and Organizations Involved

Doctors, patients, community leaders and family members are all stakeholders in this problem. Doctors and nurses, however, bear most of the responsibility for preventing opioid overdoses. In order to reduce the risk opioid overdose it is important for health care providers to educate patients on the benefits of using their drug prescription only for pain tolerance rather than as a way to achieve zero pain (Volkow & McLellan, 2016). To better assist patients who need pain medicine, nurses and doctors should recommend and prescribe lower-dosage opioid medication so that the risk of addiction or other negative effects such as depression that could lead to addiction down the round do not become too likely. Otherwise the worst-case scenario could unfold—i.e., the patient becomes addicted to opioids and becomes another statistic and victim of the ever-widening opioid epidemic. This intervention is one that can be undertaken by professionals in the health care field. But other stakeholders also have a role to play.

As Welch, Schwartz and Woloshin (2011) note, many professionals in the field of health care “push the idea that...…so many people in so many different spheres working together the health literacy of people was bound to improve in short order.

The Outcomes

The outcomes of this intervention were that the public was able to become better informed about the dangers of opioids and they were able to reduce the number of opioid overdoses within the community over a two-year stretch. The education campaign succeeded primarily through the use of social media but also through the assistance of community leaders who were engaged in educating people about the problems of opioids and how they could lead to addiction and overdosing.

On the health care facility front, training helped to raise awareness among doctors and nurses about the need to curb their habits of over-prescribing so that they would not end up doing what would be harmful for the patient. By engaging in training exercises, the health care professionals were able to see that reducing the strength of their prescriptions for pain management was the best approach to preventing opioid addiction and opioid abuses.

The community in general found other ways to deal with pain and applications for medical marijuana usage increased over the same amount of time as this was presented as an alternative option for treating pain. Any option that allowed people to get by without having to use more opioids than necessary was viewed as a success for the intervention and this was measured by taking surveys among the population and obtaining feedback from health care professionals.