The article is sensationalist in its tone.
At the very least.
But the hospital continued to give him narcotics. And after two months, they released him with a massive cocktail of drugs, including 12 tablets of the painkiller oxycodone.
Wow, 12 oxycodone. When you can prescribe 1-2 tablets every 4-6 hours, 12 doesn't make for very many tablets. I think the main issue was his drug use, combined with the alcohol and the other drugs, that they don't bother to name.
WA has a database that we can check on narcotics prescribed to a patient by different doctors, but the VA docs don't have access to it. It took a local doc moonlighting in our ER to figure out one of our patients had gotten >5000 tablets of oxycodone in 6 months, yet they never showed up in his drug screen. We don't see much of him anymore.
Our ER also will not refill pain meds for someone who is on chronic pain meds. The dog ate them, they were stolen, I dropped them in the toilet, all good excuses (NOT) are met with a sympathetic ear (
) and then they are told, too bad, so sad, go see your primary. If someone needs a short fill (3 days worth) for acute pain issues, and not receiving chronic pain meds, they "may" get it, it depends on the doc.
But, yes, I feel the VA overprescribes narcotic pain meds in some cases. I have seen scripts for 210 hydrocodone or percocet many times, but those are prescribed at 2 tabs every 6 hours, and they are filled on a monthly basis, so that is what they get.
bob