Category: Opioid Stewardship / Behavioral Health

Creating a Culture of Safety for Opioid Prescribing: Handbook for Healthcare Executives

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Healthcare executives have an important role in creating a culture for safer opioid prescribing. This handbook contains insights and advice from healthcare executives and quality improvement leaders from four different health systems representing urban, suburban and rural settings. They share their experiences engaging internal and external stakeholders, working across interdisciplinary teams, leveraging data to inform efforts, implementing training and educational efforts, and much more. Sections include:

  • The Value of Evidence-Based Opioid Prescribing
  • Collecting and Using Data
  • Engaging with External Stakeholders
  • Establishing Policies and Standards that Support Safer Opioid Prescribing Practices
  • Training and Educating Providers
  • Supporting the Continuum of Care

Partnering with Patients and Families to Strengthen Approaches to the Opioid Epidemic

Institute for Patient and Family Centered Care (IPFCC)

This whitepaper showcases the many opportunities for patients, families, and individuals with lived experience to collaborate in shaping and implementing policies and programs related to the opioid epidemic. While work in this area is evolving, several “spotlight examples” provide a starting point for thinking about new strategies and opportunities and reflect existing structures that can be utilized and expanded to accelerate the process of building meaningful partnerships.

All-Cause Harm Resource

This resource explains what All-Cause Harm is, why it is important and then dives into each of the processes it takes to prevent All-Cause Harm. Eight priority focus areas for the Hospital Quality Improvement Contract (HQIC) are illuminated and strategies to monitor compliance are provided.

All-Cause Harm Resource, Recording and Slides from the IPRO HQIC All-Cause Harm “launch” on March 29th, 2021.

Your Guide to Controlling & Managing Pain After Surgery

MHA Keystone Center

Provides education to patients related to:

  • Understanding surgical pain
  • Understanding pain after surgery
  • Questions to ask before surgery, after surgery and before discharge
  • Tools to help manage pain
  • Keeping track of pain medications and frequency
  • Common pain medication side effects

The Michigan Opioid Safety Score (MOSS): A Patient Safety and Nurse Empowerment Tool

Journal of PeriAnesthesia Nursing

The Michigan Opioid Safety Score (MOSS) was developed to incorporate patient risk, respiratory rate, and sedation into one bedside score that could be used to improve patient safety during inpatient opioid therapy. Scoring is based on a summation of risk data with objective bedside measures of over-sedation trumping a patient’s subjective reports of pain.

Opioid Overdose Prevention TOOLKIT & Opioid Use Disorder Facts

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)

This toolkit offers strategies to health care providers, communities, and local governments for developing practices and policies to help prevent opioid-related overdoses and deaths. Access reports for community members, prescribers, patients and families, and those recovering from opioid overdose.

  • Scope of the Problem
  • Strategies to Prevent Overdose Deaths
  • Resources for Communities

Managing Chronic Pain in Adults With or in Recovery From Substance Use Disorders: TIP 54

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)

This guide equips clinicians with information for treating chronic pain in adults living with a history of substance use. The guide discusses chronic pain management, including treatment with opioids. It also includes information about substance use assessments and referrals. Available at no cost from SAMSHA.

Reducing Adverse Drug Events Related to Opioids (RADEO) Implementation Guide

Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM)

Provides step-by-step guidance to assist hospital teams in implementing a quality improvement program to improve patient safety and reduce opioid-related adverse events for patients receiving opioids, including:

  • Instituting safer opioid prescribing practices resulting in fewer adverse events, like dangerous over sedation, respiratory depression and death
  • Focusing on hospitalized patients, with essential building blocks for developing a quality improvement initiative addressing the inpatient setting
  • Creating a quality improvement project team in your hospital, gaining institutional support and securing buy-in of frontline staff to ensure successful implementation
  • Developing strategies for evaluating current processes, facilitating policy formation, identifying best practices and tracking progress against implementation goals
  • Optimizing care transitions for patients on opioid therapy in the outpatient setting
  • Exploring a customized approach to address the specific needs of your hospital

Pain Management Toolkit: Iowa’s Guide to Opioid Stewardship

Iowa Healthcare Collaborative

Resources is divided into sections that can stand alone for quick reference. Addresses the real-world situations practitioners face in daily patient care (difficult conversations, non-opioid treatment interventions, acute pain treatment, tapering, chronic pain care, managing ED patients, pain control for cancer and palliative care, etc.)

Colorado Alternatives to Opioids (ALTO) Project

Colorado Hospital Association

In 2017, CHA and its partners developed the Colorado Opioid Safety Pilot, a study that was conducted in 10 hospital emergency departments (EDs) over a six-month span with a goal of reducing the administration of opioids in those EDs by 15 percent. The cohort of 10 participating sites achieved an average 36 percent reduction in the administration of opioids during those six months, as well as a 31.4 percent increase in the administration of alternatives to opioids (ALTOs). Based on the success of the pilot, CHA has launched the Colorado ALTO Project to implement this program in all hospital EDs.

E-QUAL Opioids Toolkits: Pain Management and Safe Opioid Use

American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP); Emergency Quality Network (E-QUAL)

Targeted at EDs concentrating quality efforts to improving safe opioid prescribing; Safe Prescribing Poster, Opioid Checklist, Optimizing the Treatment of Acute Pain in the ED, Alternatives to Opioids, etc.