Nurses as a critical component of the healthcare system
The nurses are a critical component of the healthcare system, due to the huge role they have in attending to the patient and supporting them during the recovery process. Therefore, they have a critical role to play in the fighting of the opioid epidemic. The caregivers have a vital role to detect opioid abuse, treat the problem, and support the patient during recovery.
Being the primary contact with the patient, the nurses have a critical role of detecting people with an opioid addiction problem for early onset of treatment. The nurses engage the patient in different environments including in the hospital and other care giving centers, at home, and the community. They also interact with the relatives, friends, and neighbors, in addition to other sources of information that allow insight into the patient and their health (ANA, 2018). Therefore, they are best situated to detect pain killer dependence.
The extensive knowledge of the patient, allows the nurses insight into the treatment process. As a result, the caregivers are better placed to influence opioid prescription to avoid wrong dosage and overuse that leads to dependence. They should help in quantifying the pain to identify the maximized amount of pain killers to prescribe that are sustainable, non-addictive, and still effective in pain management. They should also identify alternative pain management strategies that can be used (Dahn, 2017). Advanced practice nursing are also approved to prescribe opioids, which is more sustainable because they better understand the patient (ANA, 2018). They complement the other prescribers for the best results and patient wellbeing.
The nurses also have a critical role of providing support during the treatment and prevention processes. The caregivers play a critical role in planning the treatment process, by identifying the risks that the patient faces and ways to manage them. They identify the causal factors and propose measures to eliminate them. They also offer patient education on the risks of opioids abuse and the measures that can be used to prevent and manage them (ANA, 2018). Therefore, there is no doubt that the nurses are critical to the management of the opioid crisis