Question

This is for the patient with opioid medication misuse.

What are some common situations that arise with acute and chronic pain management? What can you do to reduce or eliminate potentially dangerous situations?

What can you do to protect your patients and yourself against opioid misuse? Use examples from the interactive to support your answer.

Answer 1

Acute as well as chronic pain management is one of the biggest challenges that the health care team members often face. Pain is a subjective thing. Pain is defined as what ever the patient says and however the patient perceives it. Individual perception about pain varies. Two people may perceive same situation differently.

Acute management of pain is usually achieved by giving opioid analgesics. Chronic pain such as cancer pain are also managed by giving opioid. So identifying and ruling out the real pain pose the biggest challenge to nurses.

We can avoid potentially dangerous situations by proper handling of opioid analgesia. Opioid analgesics should not be made available for the use of common public. Its production, distribution and transportation should be strictly monitored so that misuse doesn't happen. Health care workers who are handling opioid analgesics should have a complete record about it.

Patients with severe pain should be managed with other analgesics combined with non pharmacological interventions. Non pharmacological pain Relieving methods include deep breathing exercise, divertional therapy, listening to music, accupuncture etc.

Post operative patients should be given opiods only during their immediate post operative day.

Health care professionals should have a proper record of receiving opioid analgesics. It should be stored in the ward, locked and the lock to be with ward incharge. Before every shift counting of these drugs by two nurses. Documenting the use of these drugs in separate DDA(dangerous drug administration ) register with patient name, hospital number. DDA drugs to be administered by two nurses and the used ampule to be replaced to the pharmacy to obtain new ampule.

These are some of the ways to prevent misuse of morphine bt health care professionals.