Relevance of opioid guidelines in the emergency room (ROGER)

The increased use of opioid pain medications in North America in the last 2 decades has given rise an epidemic of addictions, overdoses and deaths, to which both the US and Canadian governments have enacted strategies to help combat these crises [1-3]. While these strategies develop multiple interventions to curb opioid use, a common target is to reduce physician opioid prescribing. Many patients may receive their first dose of opioid in the Emergency Department (ED), and recent studies show that there has been a steady increase in opioid prescribing in US EDs to adults (relative increase of 49% from 2001 to 2010) [4, 5].

Source: The American Journal of Emergency Medicine - July 12, 2018 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Suneel Upadhye, Andrew Worster, Rahim Valani Tags: Correspondence Source Type: research