The Brutal Math of Drug-Seeking Behavior in Prehospital Care

Dallas Fire-Rescue Medical Director Marshal Isaacs, MD, calls them "prime numbers." He’s referring not only to drug-seekers—although many of them belong to the population of patients who "fall off the grid" in between encounters with the healthcare system, and therefore pose a major challenge to being tracked over time. These patients can be transients or migrant workers; they can be living in short-stay accommodations like motels, and therefore moving frequently around a region; they can be suffering from mental illness or addiction and moving among rehabilitation centers; or they might be drug seekers trying to stay ahead of the radar, so to speak, so that they can jam their hand into a motor over here, collect narcotics to ease their pain, and not be noticed over there. Despite the overdue discussion about post-traumatic stress in EMS and Fire (which is to say, prehospital caregivers are an army of clinicians on the lookout for mental and social challenges, increasingly even among their own ranks), it can be easy to let cynicism sink in. In reality, understanding why a particular patient moves around the healthcare system demands a case-by-case view. The end result, however, is too often the same in cities and towns large and small: the patient is, in fact, lost from the view...and that's when problems happen. In an article published in September in EMS World, co-author Jonathon Feit explained how technology can help, and as...
Source: JEMS Administration and Leadership - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Exclusive Articles Documentation & Patient Care Reporting Columns Source Type: news