- April 25, 2024
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In the war on drugs, Volusia County is not exempt from the opioid epidemic sweeping the country.
Dr. Ed Prevatte, a physician in family medicine at Halifax Health Medical Center, presented statistics about the opioid crisis in Volusia County at the Port Orange City council meeting on Jan. 8. He shared information about what Halifax is doing to combat the crisis.
In 2016, there were 110 deaths due to drug overdoses in Volusia County. That number jumped to 150 in 2017. The same year, there were 620 Narcan deployments. Narcan is a drug administered to patients found unconscious from drug overdoses to revive them and save their lives. The age group with the most increase in drug induced deaths is those ages 25 to 44.
Mayor Don Burnette said he found the 620 Narcan deployments interesting, and speculated that the number likely increased in 2018.
“You think about that, and it’s basically one in every 850 people in this county," Burnette said. "And those are just the cases where we got there in time to deploy it. And one in 850 people — that’s a lot. When we talk about a health crisis, I think that qualifies.”
Volusia is only one among many facing this problem across the country. In 2016, over 11 million people nationally abused drugs, and there were 42,000 deaths. U.S. President Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis a national emergency in 2017.
With the staggering numbers of abuses and deaths reaching epidemic proportions, national organizations have set new guidelines for health care providers. The Center for Disease Control has established new guidelines for safe prescribing practices. The Food and Drug Administration is performing a regulatory overhaul. The Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Hospitals has also made the assessment and management of pain its organizational priority.
Locally, Halifax Hospital has developed a multi-disciplinary committee made up of physicians, nurses, pharmacists, research experts, patient safety teams and quality control experts who have established standards for addressing the crisis. The committee has identified best practice assessments and treatments to address chronic versus acute pain. Health personnel in the emergency room, inpatient and outpatient treatment have been given standardized tools to help assess pain based on functional impairment, levels of pain and other important factors.
In addition, physicians now have pocket-sized guidelines for safe dosing, tapering off and finding alternatives to opioid prescriptions. Online educational opportunities are readily available, as are presentations by leading experts in the field of addiction.
At Halifax Health, since guidelines have been established, the number of prescriptions written for opioids have been reduced. In the first six months of 2018, the number of opioid prescriptions written for inpatients was down 12.5% as compared with the first six months of 2017. With emergency room discharge, opioid pill prescriptions were down 28.5%.
“It looks like it’s having the desired effect, and we are decreasing the number of opioid pills written for prescription and looking for alternatives to treat patients besides turning to opioids all the time," Prevatte said. "What we feel this does is it decreases the number of pills out there in the public that could be diverted or misused.”
Halifax Health utilizes tools to screen individuals who may be more at risk for opioid addiction, or currently misuse those drugs. In Florida, Dr. Frank Farmer developed a computer data system called E-FORCSE. It is a prescription drug monitoring data base that can track patient drug use. A name is entered in the data base, and every prescription for a controlled substance prescribed to that person in the state of Florida can be identified.
Individuals who are identified with having an opioid use disorder, are linked up with programs through the Stewart-Marchman-Act where they can get treatment for their addiction. However, Stewart-Marchman has limited resources, so not everyone can get the help they need. Private treatment centers help to fill the gap, but there is a limited number of resources in Florida to help with substance disorders.
