Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain: A Quality Improvement Project

Several healthcare providers have failed to follow proper opioid prescribing practices to treat chronic pain in recent years. Therefore, the nation is experiencing an epidemic of opioid addiction, which has destroyed many lives. This quality improvement project aims to assess healthcare providers prescribing practices using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's guidelines to treat chronic pain.

The methodology used was the Plan-Do-Study-Act framework. A total of 120 charts were reviewed before the pre and post-implementation of the CDC's guidelines to assess the prescribing practices of health care providers. Also, the QI project follows SQUIRE's 2.0 guidelines to describe the prescribing practices of providers. SQUIRE is a framework that helps researchers report new knowledge on improving patient care in the health care system. The literature review section in this article illuminates current evidence of using opioid guidelines and had provided guidance on how to improve opioids prescribing practices among providers. The guidelines can be retrieved at http://squire-statement.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.ViewPage&PageID=471 OUTCOMES: Using the CDC's guidelines helps to assess the prescribing practices of health care providers, the prescription rates of opioids dropped from 33.3% pre-implementation to 16.7% post-implementation.

Opioid prescriptions are a significant contributor to the rising opioid epidemic; therefore, educating clinicians about safe prescribing practices is crucial.