Opioid Safety in California: Having Difficult Conversations with Patients and with Colleagues February 27, 2017 Physician Resource CHCF, Opioids 0 The February CHCF Update: Opioid Safety in California offers three tools in a challenging area — having difficult conversations about opioid safety with patients and with colleagues. Clinicians may struggle with how to say no — with compassion — to patients who are suffering and believe that opioids will help their pain. Dr. Roneet Lev and the California American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) developed a script (PDF) to help emergency physicians discuss opioid safety with their patients. The San Diego Prescription Drug Abuse Task Force developed a script for pharmacists to consider when calling providers to verify a potentially unsafe prescription. Partnership HealthPlan created a toolkit (PDF) to help clinicians with the hard work of tapering patients on high opioid doses to safer regimens, which includes scripts and motivational interviewing techniques. Comments are closed.
