KHTS Radio Santa Clarita Radio – Santa Clarita News
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to notify doctors if their patient has died from an opioid overdose.
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Supervisor Janice Hahn and her co-author, Supervisor Hilda L. Solis, proposed the new policy after an innovative study in San Diego showed that these types of letters reduce opioid prescriptions.
“This is a simple concept that works,” said Supervisor Janice Hahn. “When San Diego tried sending out these letters, doctors who learned about patient overdoses chose to reduce the number of opioids they prescribed. This is a creative and easy strategy that will save lives, and I am eager to implement it in LA County.”
The board has instructed the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner to begin sending letters to doctors in December 2018.
Of the 72,000 Americans who died from opioid overdoses in 2017, the CDC estimates that nearly half died as a result of an opioid that was prescribed to them by a doctor.
Doctors often had no way of knowing whether a prescription they wrote ultimately led to the death of their patient, according to county officials.
Notifying doctors about the deaths can make them think twice about prescribing dangerous drugs, according to research done by the county’s Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner Dr. Jonathan Lucas.
Lucas began sending similar letters to doctors while working as the chief deputy medical examiner in San Diego County.
Related: County Supervisors Address Suicide Among First Responders, Emergency Personnel
Within his research, Lucas found that doctors who received a letter wrote 10 percent fewer opioid prescriptions over the three-month study period.
“Awareness works,” Lucas said. “Alerting doctors about patient overdose deaths is a unique opportunity for the department to have an impact on public health, effect change and potentially save lives.”
Santa Clarita is the third largest city in Los Angeles County, making it vulnerable to issues such as drug abuse.
“I think that the more we do to combat the opioid epidemic in the United States, and certainly LA County, the better,” said Bob Sharits, program director for The Way Out Recovery SCV. “This is a great idea, and although you would assume doctors know everything about what they prescribe, oftentimes they don’t understand the addictive properties.”
Since 2011, the number of opioid deaths in Santa Clarita has fluctuated with 11 overdose deaths, the highest count since that year, according to Cpt. Robert Lewis, who leads the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station.
As of July 2018, Santa Clarita has seen seven opioid deaths, and that number is slowly increasing.
“It’s coming our way and it’s going to be coming stronger and stronger,” said Lewis.
The letters are expected to be informative, non-judgmental and educational, according to county officials.
After an accidental opioid-related death, letters will be sent to all prescribers who wrote an opioid prescription to the patient that was filled within the 12 months prior to the fatal overdose.
“They aim to alert providers about the potential dangers of opioid medications and how common death from misuse of these medications is in Los Angeles County,” said Hahn in a statement.
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Hi Lorena,
First off, thank you and your staff for sharing information to keep us informed. Just wanted to express my own opinion of this particular article. It seems many of our systems require major reform. We seem to see these types of issues surface time and time again. We are usually reactive instead of proactive in dealing with them. I appreciate both approaches, but wouldn’t it be better for us to tackle these issues at the core from a proactive perspective? The reactive approach draws off of many fears and negative feelings, and when we change processes for particular results (especially from negative emotions) we usually get negative results. Unless there is an awareness and crystal clear reframing of those negative issues we end up with the status quo. This subject, in particular, seems a bit reactive & costly to tell doctors something they already know and are aware of on a daily basis. Doctors have to review History and Physical’s on patients daily, but rarely have time or expertise in digging for psychological issues that seem so rampant in our culture that we often turn to chemical or substance abuse. This spills over to more than just a disease problem, but a systems problem combined w/ human behavior risk problems. No easy fix, without understanding it more in detail. These seem to be at the core issues that plague our culture. Change the system, fairly simple. Change the collective risky behavior, debatable. How do we change peoples risky behavior?, should be the starting question of a more deep rooted problem. I know there are programs with core concepts that address these issues using works like Daniel Kahnemann & Amos Tversky on human economics. Nobel prize winning work, yet how many programs out there can say they use this work as a basis for their program? If we truly have programs that work, and I believe we do, then how do we identify these programs and weed out the ineffective ones? Are our decision makers really collaborating often to mitigate these risks and ineffective programs? If so, show us in more detail. If not, show us the effort in planning with details. I know, same things over and over again. How do we tackle these things if we are not all on the same playing field? Let’s keep the questions coming! You’re a journalist, right? Socratic method? Draw it out of people? I know I’m a little idealistic and opinionated. Does anyone really care?