Pharmacists Play Key Role in Addressing Opioid Crisis Through Education

Timothy D Fensky, RPh, DPh, FACA, director of operations at Advanced Wellness Pharmacy and chairperson at the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, emphasizes the crucial role pharmacists can play in addressing the opioid crisis through education, advocacy, and collaboration. He stresses the importance of Opioid Awareness Month as an opportunity to educate the public and reduce the stigma surrounding substance use disorders. Pharmacists are encouraged to educate themselves, their patients, and the broader community to dispel common misconceptions, such as viewing addiction as a moral failing or believing it only affects low-income populations. Beyond education, Fensky highlights the need for pharmacists to advocate for harm reduction strategies, like providing clean needles and overdose prevention resources, as well as pushing for policy changes to enable greater pharmacist involvement in supporting those with substance use disorders. Furthermore, he underscores the value of pharmacists working closely with other clinicians to conduct comprehensive patient assessments, review medication histories, and provide tailored education and referrals to treatment services. By leveraging their unique position and expertise, pharmacists can be instrumental in tackling the opioid crisis through a multifaceted approach.

Q: Why is it important to raise awareness about opioid addiction? What is the significance of Opioid Awareness Month?

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Timothy D Fensky: Opioid Awareness Month, I mean, it's really to educate the public. There's a lot of lot of stigma around people who useopioids and who have substance use disorders. We really want to reduce stigma for this disease state so that it's like any other disease state it needs to be brought to the forefront. We need to promote prevention and harm reduction, overdose prevention, providing clean needles and education on Naloxone for overdose prevention. This also helps reduce infection for diseases with clean needles to lower our HIV and hepatitis, hepatitis C in particular. We also want to make sure that we're providing access to treatment for people for support services for individuals that really need help in this area as well. Overall increase overall well being for everyone, including individuals who have opioid use disorder. This could be very controversial. I mean, I know that a lot of people don't like the fact that the harm reduction is clean needles, it's safe injection sites, it's opioid treatment programs. But these individuals need their need help too, in order to to be taken care of as any other patient would be. It's also a way for pharmacists to basically be an advocate for a policy change as well. Within their own profession, there's a lot of issues around policies and that need to be changed across the United States to allow pharmacy to get more involved and any any other clinician for that matter.

Q: What are some common misconceptions about opioid addiction?

The top ones that come to mind for me is that people say this is a moral failing on the individual's part. But you need to take various factors into play, like people's genetics, their environment that they're that they're in, this psychological stress that everybody's under. Another one is people think that this is only for low income communities only. I can tell you right now, that's false too. I mean, you probably know these names like Heath Ledger, Marilyn Monroe, Prince. I mean all these individuals suffered with some type of opiate or some type of controlled medication, and it's just not just for people who are low income that. It does cross affect many, many populations. Everybody has stresses in their life, and some people from "am I going to be able to pay the rent?" to "What is the public want for me?" as far as celebrities and everything.

So another one is that people with substance disorder are they lack self control, which I I've never been able to understand. Health care providers need to understand that that addiction is disease that changes person's brain reward system, and it's difficult to resist urges, and this even includes alcohol. This isn't just opioids, this includes alcohol as well. Then one of the last ones, I think that really gets to me is that opioids are for criminals, which is not the case. People who start on on opioid sometimes it's because of the sports injury, it's or a car accident, and and they start taking it, and based on their history, they could have history or genetics of substance use disorder. It affects everybody. Those are the stigmas that that we need to really change our outlook on.

Q: How can pharmacists help dispel these myths?

I'm going to say 5 words, okay, and it's, educate, educate, educate, refer, and advocate. Okay? What I mean by that ispharmacists need to educate themselves. They need to educate their patients, and they have to be able to educate the public around them. That's going to help dispel all these myths. It's going to help with the stigma. and then they need to be able to refer patients to treatment support services that are within their own local community. and they need to basically advocate for these harm reduction strategies and for these policy changes that I just discussed earlier.

Q: What is the pharmacist's role in addressing the opioid crisis?

I think pharmacists are in a position to do comprehensive patient assessments. They can review patient history of opioid use. Previous treatments, take that in consideration when they're they're getting new medications and educate the patients. Looking at risk factors of family history, other mental disorders, the social stressors in their lives. They can give them patient education for safe usage, storage and disposal of all the medications with a focus on schedule II through V medications, anything that's federally controlled in collaboration with other clinicians. The communication or collaboration with clinicians is key on this whole thing, whether you're going to communicate back to the clinician that you feel is that this person may not want to be on this medication, it's their choice to still prescribe it, but it's just a communication or a collaborative practice agreements where we're able to work with clinicians and actually help assess and give feedback to the clinician, so they have a full picture of the individual who's in front of us.