Articles Tagged With: fentanyl
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Worker Shortage, Pandemic Make Drug Diversion Easier
Drug diversion can happen quickly as healthcare workers move from one facility to another, enabled by lax reporting systems and hospital disincentives to alert patients and raise liability issues. Diverters may slip through cracks in oversight by medical and nursing boards as they move to other facilities and are lost to follow-up.
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Multistate Drug Diverter’s Plea Denied, Faces 29 More Years
When it comes to discussion and analysis of drug diversion, David Kwiatkowski is the elephant in the room. More aptly, he is in a Florida federal prison cell. A hepatis C virus carrier, Kwiatkowski was sentenced to 39 years in prison in 2013 for infecting a string of victims with HCV as he diverted drugs from multiple hospitals in eight states. Tracking back through this trail of tears, federal officials with the Department of Health and Human Services tallied 45 HCV-infected patients, two of whom died.
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Case Managers Can Better Educate Patients and Families About Opioid Addiction
While the world focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, another crisis — the opioid epidemic — continued to unfold, taking hundreds of thousands of lives. Hospital discharge is an opportunity for case managers and other providers to help prevent patients from becoming victims of opioid overdoses.
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Drug Diversion: A Risk to Patients, Health Workers, and the Institution
Drug diversion is an ongoing problem for healthcare organizations. In identifying diverters, leaders are protecting patients and mitigating their institution’s substantial liability risk. -
Drug Diversion Creates Significant Liability Risk
Drug diversion is a perennial problem for healthcare organizations. Risk managers should know there is substantial liability risk from the possible effects on patient safety. This problem is not improving, industry sources say — and some things are getting worse. -
Advanced Management of Opioid Overdose in the Emergency Department
This article aims to provide acute care providers with advanced techniques in the management of opioid overdoses, including the use of naloxone, the opioid receptor antagonist, as well as harm reduction management strategies aimed at long-term risk mitigation in this vulnerable population.