Unrestrained PRN

Sometimes we get complacent.  A very nice diabetic came to the hospital about 10 days back having been at our other campus not long ago.  He had a foot wound requiring two toe amputations here.  Glucose management at the other hospital seemed more difficult than it was here, with the continuation of insulin dosing proving too much, particularly the nightly basal dose which brought the dawn glucoses too low.  With some minor revisions the glucose control coasted along, his BP remained decent on medicine and his underlying cardiovascular disease mandated high dose atorvastatin which he continued uneventfully.  He always seemed pleasant, never seemed in any distress, a placid and pleasant fellow who never complained, at least not to me.

Ordinarily I take a look at my medicines on daily rounds.  The computer makes this easy by putting an asterisk next to the medicines I ordered.  There were antibiotics and there were analgesics ordered by other people to which I did not pay a lot of attention, his being in the hands of medical and surgical colleagues who do this professionally.

As he prepared for discharge I went over the list and noted a prn q 4h oxycontin order.  When I called up how much he actually took, it turns out that he has been requesting 4 doses a day on roughly a q4h while awake pattern every day for 5 consecutive days.  It seemed like a much larger amount of medicine than I would have anticipated for somebody who never looked uncomfortable at any of my visits.  Needless to say there are questions relating to his medical care and there are better ways to manage ongoing anticipated pain.  Was his pain control adequate or was there incomplete treatment of its source?  Does he really desire euphoria more than analgesia?  Does the prn nature of the order create a conflict between a patient in pain now and a surgical nurse who is otherwise occupied at the time with other patients whose needs are more immediate?

And who should be the one noticing this aberration?  I asked some of the nurses on the ward at the time if they note excessive prn use of opiates as the patients start demanding it of them repetitively.  Generally no, as no single nurse dispenses more than two in any shift and doesn't really come passively on the overall utilization.  I asked the pharmacist.  There really is no automatic mechanism to detect this.  Every day  there is a group meeting to discuss the progress and discharge planning for each patient.  Needless to say, this would not continue past discharge, but it whizzes by the daily sessions.  And then there is the surgical resident.  They look at wounds at the bedside.  Looking at medicines is a distraction from their surgical tasks.

So as we deal professionally with excess opiate utilization as a public health crisis, how much of that was our own creation, initial legitimate prescribing with a blind eye to use that seems excessive.  We have no mechanism to intercept that other than individual diligence in paying attention to medicine orders and administration.  Alas, good systems work better than astute people, and our system here seems absent.