Confronting the opioid crisis with consumer health information: a look at East Tennessee.

Kelsey Leonard Grabeel,Jenny C Moore

doi:10.5195/jmla.2021.1015

Abstract

Background:Starting in the 1990s, health care providers began prescribing opioids to patients as pain relievers, believing they were safe. However, many patients became addicted to these pills. In 2017, the US Department of Health and Human Services declared a public health emergency to fight the opioid epidemic. This crisis was prevalent in East Tennessee, where many residents were prescribed opioids.Case Presentation:Librarians at an academic medical center library in East Tennessee analyzed the health information requests related to pain, mental health, and addiction over the last fifteen years. We reviewed the pattern of requests related to these topics, the counties requesting this information, and the impact that these hospital policies had on these requests.Conclusions:From 2005 to 2014, there were few requests about mental health, pain, and substance abuse. However, once the library moved into the hospital and there was an increase in awareness of opioid addiction, requests on those topics increased. Most of the requests were about pain, with the height occurring in 2017, during which year the public health emergency to fight the epidemic was declared. Additionally, 2017 was the year the hospital implemented visitor limitations for patients with infections associated with intravenous drug use, which might explain the drastic drop in substance abuse information requests in 2018. Future outreach will target counties that have a high opioid prescription rate.

Highlights

Starting in the 1990s, health care providers began prescribing opioids to patients as pain relievers, believing they were safe
The Appalachian region, which includes the area that the hospital serves, has a 65% higher mortality rate due to substance abuse than the rest of the nation, and 69% of those overdose deaths were opioid related [4]
From 2005 to 2014, the proportion of pain and mental health information requests remained steady, and the proportion of substance abuse information requests was never higher than 1% of the total number of yearly information requests (Figure 1)

Summary

Introduction

Starting in the 1990s, health care providers began prescribing opioids to patients as pain relievers, believing they were safe. In 2017, the US Department of Health and Human Services declared a public health emergency to fight the opioid epidemic. This crisis was prevalent in East Tennessee, where many residents were prescribed opioids. According to the US Health and Human Services Department (HHS), health care providers began prescribing opioid pain relievers at a high rate in the late 1990s, believing they were safe [1]. Pain even became known as the fifth vital sign in order to make pain relief a part of patient well-being, which encouraged the prescription of opioids [2]. In 2017, HHS declared a public health emergency, which was called the “opioid crisis.”

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