Essay On Substance Abuse In Nursing

Being a nurse is one of the hardest jobs, including one of the lowest paying for the workload nurses take on. Nurses go through years of schooling, and many nurses often end up disliking their chosen profession. There seems to always be a shortage of nurses so many nurses are more than often overworked and underpaid. Having another individual’s health hang in your balance can cause mental and physical exhaustion which can eventually lead to nurse burnout. Many nurses that work in high-stress environments and not having the proper training or enough assistance can lead to serious mistakes in patient care.

According to Michael Klein, “The most prescription drugs that are commonly misused are opioids, tranquillizers, sedatives, and hypnotics.” Unintentional overdose deaths involving opioid pain relievers have quadrupled since 1999 and have outnumbered those involving heroin and cocaine since 2002. (Klein). The reason some people abuse opioids is just to “get high”.

The key to safer and more effective prescribing is to educate doctors about addiction and alternative approaches to pain management. The State programs cited by CDC include an increased effort to monitor and intervene in areas of high-risk prescribing. The PDMP are tools that have been implemented in most states and these create a central database to enable prescribers and dispensers to see all prescription activity for certain classes of opioids (CDC,

I thought about nursing burnout through watching the video by speaker Madelyn Blaire. Burnout is categorized as physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion. Burnout can lead to dulled emotions and detachment. I wonder why nurses are burning out.

Opioid include morphine and heroin among others. Proper use of these drugs for their approved diagnostics usually delivers significant welfares to the ailing patients. However, due to their pleasurable impacts, these drugs are liable to the risk of mishandling, abuse, and eventual addiction. Currently, the United States is in the middle of a pandemic involving opioid overindulgence. The provision of the prescription opioid analgesics is at a high rate in the nation.

This nature of work can have devastating effects on the health and wellbeing of a nurse. There are three concepts related to adverse consequences of caring work: these are compassion fatigue, burnout and vicarious traumatization.

Furthermore, nursing burnout has costly effects on an organization, causing poor retention rates, reduced productivity, increased absenteeism, difficulty recruiting, and high turnover rates, along with increased medical errors and reduced quality

Opioid pain medications are some of the most commonly abused prescription drugs. Between 1991 and 2010, opioid prescriptions rose from about 75.5 million to 209.5 million. Americans account for 4.6% of the world’s population but consume approximately 80% of the world’s opioid supply. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 12 million people used prescription painkillers for nonmedical reasons in 2010. Opioid abuse has led to increases in emergency-department visits, hospitalizations, and admissions to substance-abuse treatment centers at a time when our healthcare system is already strained.

Nurses working in an ICU setting for several years tend to get burn out from all the stress. This is called “burn out syndrome” (American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care

Assessment This patient has been taking medication because they suffered a sports injury in 2010. The pills have been prescribed from by their PCP. Therefore, the client tested positive for opiates. The client also states that they have never had any issues with drugs in the past and that they have never had any problems with their professional license or employment.

Paracetamol, codeine, lorazepam are three commonly use drugs among population (Rhea and Reynaldo 391). Abuse of different medication show different effects on a person, and many people die because of drug abuse. Nevertheless,

Availability of opioids puts more and more people at risk for addiction. A simple prescription from the doctor for a migraine or back pain can turn into an addiction. Doctors are faced daily with patients who complain of pain, acute and chronic. It has become a simple solution for them to write out a prescription for pain medication to help their patient. In turn, not helping them at all.

Nurses fatigue is growing problem nurse face each day in the healthcare environment, and he can be caused by long hours, sleep deprivation, and possibly by accepting extra assignments can be dangerous for both nurses and patient. These inadequacies can result in major implications for the health and safety of registered nurses and can compromise patient care which can lead to fatalities. (American Nurses Association, 2014). In my experience, being fatigued from working much 12-hour shifts consecutively was very difficult as I felt extremely tired, resulting in lack of focus, missing important details during the handing over the process with impaired cognitive functioning. This I found was detrimental to the patients and myself as it impedes quality and has a deleterious effect on patient safety.

These nurses work tirelessly to save the tiniest patients with an addiction to cocaine or the ones with exposed or missing organs. Neonatal registered nurses (RN), arguably, have one of the most emotionally stressful jobs that leave them resembling a

Nurses experienced unsatisfied work environment, fatigue, burnout and increased in career change leading to the nursing