Empowering Nurses: Communicating Potential Medication Misuse

In nursing education and practice, we prepare nurses on topics such as patient care, pathophysiology, pharmacology, nursing leadership, and nursing competencies. Unfortunately, we may be missing the mark when it comes to integrating these topics and applying them to situations that arise in health care such as medication misuse. Nurses work intimately with patients and can recognize potential medication misuse by reviewing medication regimens and assessing necessity of PRN patient requests. In cases where nurses suspect misuse, they may or may not feel comfortable addressing these concerns with other members of the health care team.

Study aims were to assess the baseline of whether nurses are comfortable with their level of skill to recognize potential patient medication misuse and to assess nurses' comfortability with communicating these concerns with other nurses, providers, and patients.

This survey study was designed to obtain practical information about nurses understanding of misused and diverted prescription medications and level of comfort with expressing concerns about the use of central nervous system depressants to inform education, practice, and research. Three-hundred and fifty nurses at one hospital were invited to participate in an anonymous REDCap survey.

Thirty-five percent of the surveyed nurses returned the survey. Responding nurses were more comfortable sharing their own knowledge and the need for more education on the topic than they were discussing interdisciplinary communication.

Empowering nurses to communicate this knowledge with others on the health care team has major public health implications to reduce the negative outcomes of misused medications.