For two registered nurses in Guttenberg, the opioid crisis is real

Guttenberg Municipal Hospital & Clinics is one of 23 Iowa hospitals which has received a grant through the Iowa Healthcare Collaborative to study ways to decrease the use of opioids.

Opioids killed more than 42,000 people in 2016, more than any year on record, according to the Center for Disease Control.  40 percent of all opioid overdose deaths involve a prescription opioid.

Thursday night RNs Robin Esmann and Joan Parker spoke in Decorah about the campaign to discover the causes of opioid abuse and new programs to combat that abuse.  The presentation was sponsored by Northeast Iowa Behavioral Health.

Parker says many people who get hooked on opioids will go from emergency room to emergency room in an attempt to get a prescription filled several times.  That's why Iowa and four other neighboring states are part of a system to alert pharmacists to multiple requests for opioids. 

Parker also says doctors and nurses are being coached to focus on a patient's "comfort level," rather than "pain level," saying the reframing of the question can allow doctors to prescribe fewer pain relievers.

Esmann says another approach is to try non-opioid treatments first, including meditation and chiropractic treatment and other approaches that don't involve prescriptions.  She says one study showed as many as one in four people prescribed opioids wound up having long-term problems.

Another development she says she's worried about is the practice of mixing other drugs into opioids that are sold "on the street."  "You really don't know what's in them," she says.  It's one of the reasons misuse of opioids has quadrupled from 1999 to 2008.

More information about opioid abuse is available from the CDC website, https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/