Handling Drug Diversion in the Workplace

Doug Hooten, CEO of MedStar Mobile Healthcare in Fort Worth, Texas, and Matt Zavadsky, the Chief Strategic Integration Officer at MedStar gave a compelling presentation on drug diversion at the annual meeting of the American Ambulance Association (AAA) on Saturday, Sept. 8, 2018, at the MGM Grand Hotel Conference Center in Las Vegas. They opened with a sobering point for administrators: if you don’t have a drug diversion/misuse issue in your agency, it’s only because you’re not looking for it. Ensuring a safe environment for your employees (and your patients) should be the primary goal of any ambulance agency, and Hooten and Zavadsky stressed that uncovering potential drug diversions takes serious focus, effort and investigatory skills. MedStar has developed a very robust process for identifying potential incidents of drug diversions and effectively working through the myriad of issues they create. And, if you do find an employee potentially committing diversion, what is the most appropriate way to deal with it, for the employee and the profession. Processes & Recordkeeping Are Critical Hooten said that you have to look for patterns of how employees use medications, stray from protocols (e.g., give pain meds when it’s not necessarily called for) and even monitor employee attendance, particularly if the employee has a high waste history. It was noted that paramedics can be pretty creative in how they skim medications. They might give saline to the patient and then ...
Source: JEMS Administration and Leadership - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Exclusive Articles Administration and Leadership Source Type: news