Free Paper Sample: Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs

The PICO question," In patients suffering from chronic non-cancer pain, will prescription of medication simplifies their suffering?" will have to measure both the short term and the long terms outcomes. The project's short-term outcomes are increased the medication adherence and reduced blood pressure within six weeks. The complete evidence-based practice project was designed for over three months based on the known five primary action steps worksheet. Opioids including semi-synthetic opiates for instance heroin derived from well-known morphine and the synthetic drugs like propoxyphene (Rutkow et al., 2015). A feeling of complete relaxation is induced when prescription controlled medication is taken in excess.

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The use of the medicines causes abuses as well as addiction. Because the patient is in constant pain, they may overdose the drug to ensure they are in steady state relaxation. Due to this, patients with the chronic non-cancer pain misuse the prescription medication of pain, and it is thus important to come up with programs to solve this problem. This is through the implementation of Prescription Drug-Monitoring Programs (PDMP) in a primary care setting to reduce the abuse of opiates as well as to determine if substitute pain medications or therapy are needed for chronic non-cancer pain. The complete evidence-based practice project has been done within ten months (Rutkow et al., 2015). The project implementation phase will approximately take eight months to determine the extent of relaxation if the prescribed medication is taken in excess.

PDMPs are referred to as statewide databases that deal with collecting data from the pharmacies. The data shows the number of the prescriptions of the controlled substances dispensed from the pharmacies to get rid of their misuse as well as diversion. The pharmacies provide reports on medication data within a year which include the dates when medications were just dispensed and patient to whom the drug was prescribed (Lin et al., 2018). It is using the databases that fake prescriptions and any diversion of these controlled pain medication may be identified. Patients suffering from chronic non-cancer pain look for medical attention from the primary care physicians in a primary care setting.

It thus means that the primary care provider should keep track of some drugs received by the facility and the prescriptions to each of the patients. Majority of the primary care facilities don't have a drug monitoring system where the data may be required. To monitor the signs of wrongful prescriptions resulting from prescription controlled pain medication misuse may become challenging (Lin et al., 2018). PDMPs implementation, therefore, will be good to combat the issue of the illegal prescriptions integrally solving problem of controlled pain medication misuse. This will be a chance to improve the practice of the controlled pain prescriptions through monitoring number of drugs that given to patients. It may also be used to make recommendations for any other forms of pain medications as well as therapy.

Five key action steps will guide the implementation action plan of the general EBP project centered on the literature searches conducted. A sensitization initiative is started targeting employees the primary health care facility. Employees will be educated on the PDMPs relevance. Here, project leader and information technologist will be involved and the step will stay for three days. Secondly, PDMP database installation in facility computers will be done for training and will take two days. Demonstrating PDMP will be the third step. Application of the program practically then follows (Rutkow et al., 2015). Registered nurses and management will do feeding details and password settings with the help of project leader and information technologist taking a week. Finally, receiving and reviewing information from PDMP patients and then the nurses will have to determine whether the patient is abusing prescribed medication and give alternative medication or even recommendations. The step of the action plan is expected to last three months, and the program user can extend beyond the three months.

Two nurse practitioners and two physicians will aid the IT specialist to install as well as demonstrate the use of PDMP when installed. The registered nurses and the management will later join in step four. Other resources may include videos, computers, writing materials, PDMP software, training website, a few machines and writing material. Some of the barriers may include lack of impression from illiterate nurses and lack of finances (Lin et al., 2018). It is also hard to schedule all registered nurses and management to see the demonstration. Oral and written mode of communication will be used.

In summary, the productive use of PDMPs is a very practice that will decrease the chances of misuse of opiates and any other controlled substances. It is suggested that primary caregivers be equipped with skills that are needed to keep track of the patients' prescriptions. The PDMPs are good at facilitating this activity. Skills can be improved by conducting adequate training sessions to help caregivers use the program to monitor prescription of all the controlled substances (Lin et al., 2018). From the findings, the physicians and nurses can determine if alternative medications, as well as recommendations, are required to control the patient's chronic non-cancer pain.

References

Lin, H. C., Wang, Z., Boyd, C., Simoni-Wastila, L., &Buu, A. (2018). Associations between statewide prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP) requirement and physician patterns of prescribing opioid analgesics for patients with non-cancer chronic pain. Addictive behaviors, 76, 348-354.

Rutkow, L., Turner, L., Lucas, E., Hwang, C., & Alexander, G. C. (2015). Most primary care physicians are aware of prescription drug monitoring programs, but many find the data difficult to access. Health Affairs, 34(3), 484-492.