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Obamacare, You're Fired - December 2016 - Subscribe to Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.

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D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6 • O U T PA T I E N TS U R G E R Y. N E T • 6 5 feel improvements in technology and techniques will someday com- pletely eliminate opioids from surgery and discharge prescriptions. We all know what's happening with the unintentional abuse of painkillers when patients cross the line from post-op pain control to addiction." The same nurses who used to routinely pump patients full of pain meds are now thrilled that Dr. Haas has championed opioid-sparing surgery. They can tell which patients have traveled along the new pain control pathway without even checking their charts. "All you have to do is walk into the PACU and look around," says Dr. Rosas. OSM doses in order to achieve the same desired effect," he says. Patients with history of drug abuse, who are on opioids for a chronic painful condition and who are depressed are at the highest risk of abusing opioids prescribed after surgery, says Dr. Gan. He also points out that relatives or friends with abuse history who live in the same house as recovering patients might be unable to resist pain medications left in the medicine cabinet. "When the Joint Commission introduced pain as the 5 th vital sign, physicians increased the number of prescriptions they wrote for opioids," says Dr. Gan. "The present-day epidemic may be in part the consequence of that." Going forward, he says, physicians need to be more aware of the opioid-abuse problem and change their prescribing habits by limiting the duration of opioid prescriptions to a shorter period — 5 to 7 days, for example — and including the option of refill as needed. — Daniel Cook

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