Healthcare Compliance Perspective:
Compliance Officer needs to audit their provider’s policy/procedure for staff substance abuse incidents/accidents and ensure being followed as needed. Compliance Officer must then report findings to Compliance Committee.
Last week in Massillon, Ohio, news media reported that three nurses involved in the treatment of a patient who was believed to have overdosed on fentanyl, were incapacitated while cleaning up the patient’s room by “secondary exposure,” and had to be treated with Narcan, a drug used in cases of overdose on heroin and fentanyl.
Fentanyl is a powerful analgesic- 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine, and normally is used as a pain reliever for patients after surgery. It is another of the highly addictive opioids that are feeding the growing class of opioid drugs and the opioid epidemic spreading like wildfire across the country and throughout the world. Reports of opioid overdoses and deaths are making more and more news headlines.
Because of the drug’s deadly effects and the fact that it can be absorbed into the body by just inhaling; and, because it only takes a miniscule amount equal to a few grains of salt, fentanyl poses a real and present danger to healthcare providers, and others. Police in Harrisburg, PA, have recently stopped doing preliminary tests in the field to learn what substances they were dealing with; now, they send the substances straight to the lab.
There is not an easy fix for healthcare workers who are charged with rendering often life-saving procedures to patients; or, as in the case of the three nurses, just cleaning up a room.
