It’s well known that the U.S. is facing an opioid addiction crisis, with overdose deaths rising steadily over the past decade.
Melissa Bailey, a reporter at Kaiser Health News, wrote an article that delves into a different facet of the crisis: at-home hospice care.
"Because this opioid epidemic is really affecting everyone, rich and poor, you can't make assumptions about who might be at risk," said Bailey.
In her reporting, Bailey encountered stories of those who stole and abused opioid prescription painkillers from at-home hospice patients.
"There's no real good national data on this problem. We don't know how common this is, but we do know that enrollment in hospice has been rising rapidly. About half of people who die in America are now in hospice care. And most of the time hospice staff are actually coming to the home," Bailey said on "Central Time."
And of course, opiate overdose deaths are on the rise as well.
Hospices are in a difficult position because terminally ill patients receiving palliative care need pain medication, but people in their lives, including hospice staff themselves, might be at risk for stealing and abusing that medication.
In terms of solutions, several experts that Bailey spoke with suggested mandated screenings of patients and their families for drug abuse history, as well as writing agreements about what the family's responsibility is and consequences for missing medication.
Some hospices that Bailey interviewed have taken steps to deal with this problem, including limiting the amount of medication that gets sent home at any one time, prescribing painkillers like methadone that are thought to be less abusable and having nurses count the medication every time they visit.
Overall however, there is scant oversight, she said.
After a patient dies, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency policy is that prescription drugs become property of the deceased's family, Bailey said. So, that means hospice staff can't confiscate or destroy drugs after a patient dies unless there’s state legislation in place.
Ohio, Delaware, New Jersey and South Carolina have such laws on the books, and Wisconsin, Illinois and Georgia moved forward similar bills earlier this year, according to Bailey's article.
