Emergence of a ‘prescription drug abuse epidemic’.
Before settling into general practice, I spent a year working as the first medical director of the home care team at St Francis Hospice in Raheny. The beautiful building didn’t exist then; we worked from a Portakabin, providing palliative care in the community. There was an element of frontier medicine in what we did, breaking new ground on Dublin’s northside.
Apart from the many resource challenges we faced, I remember one significant clinical hurdle: a lingering reluctance to prescribe or consume opioid painkillers. Much of the team’s efforts went into educating patients, their families and, to some extent, health professionals not to be afraid to use morphine-like drugs in sufficient dosage.
Source: The IRish Times, 31/05/2011
Safer Student Nights
eBulletin
Poll
