Formulating Health Care Policy
Tiffany Wright
Chamberlain College of Nursing
Formulating Health Care Policy
Public Policy Issue: Opioid Overdose Epidemic
Drug overdoses are a major source of preventable death in the United States These overdoses are product of prescription opioids, as well as illegal opiate drugs like heroin. This endemic affects us all in some capacity. Overdoses leave families and communities devastated and cost the American public 20 billion dollars annually for overdoses (Timothy, Inoccencio, Norman, Read, & Holdford, 2013). In the state of Ohio the abuse of opioids has attained rampant magnitude. In 2013 unintentional drug overdoses instigated 2,110 deaths of Ohio residents, exceeding the previous record set in 2012 by 10.2 percent (Ohio Department of Health, 2015. It also resumes being the principal cause of injury-related death in Ohio, ahead of motor vehicle traffic crashes, suicide and falls (Ohio Department of Health, 2015). This manuscript will attend to my personal interest in the opioid epidemic, its applicability to nursing, problem sources, empirical evidence critique, evidence based practice options, initiatives to decrease accidental overdose deaths, what levels of Government involvement is necessary and resources for current information.
Opioid Overdose Epidemic: Why It Matters To Me
In the United States 259 million prescriptions for opioid narcotic were wrote in 2012, enough for every adult in this country to have a bottle of pills (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2015). A recent study disclosed in the state of Ohio four out of five of drugs used by high school seniors is prescription medications (Ohio Department of Health, 2015). The main reason sited was prescription medications are easier to acquire than alcohol (Ohio Department of Health, 2015). Youth procure them in medicine cabinets and consider them innocuous because they are prescribed. Additionally, it...