This paper will discuss narcotics control. Among the issues to be explored are narcotics abuse by health care professionals, federal guidelines on handling narcotics, penalties for narcotics misuse by health care professionals, and the treatment and rehabilitation of narcotic abusing medical personnel. Abuse of narcotics by doctors, anesthesiologists, nurses and other health care professionals with readily available access to narcotics is an important issue because patient care may be negatively impacted.
Continuous compulsive use of mood altering substances like narcotics and alcohol despite their adverse consequences is considered a primary disease (called chemical dependence). Physicians and other health professionals are considered impaired when the drug dependence or other cause results in inability to provide patients with reasonable skill and safety in
the practice of medicine (Gallegos 191-6).
Cognitive, interpersonal and psychomotor dysfunction from alcohol and drug dependence are pervasive among health care professionals like nurses. In fact, 68% of all state board of nursing actions against nurses result from substance abuse (Solari-Twadell 103-4).
Surveys of anesthesia training programs indicate that three-quarters of the programs have found instances of drug dependence involving the controlled substances used in daily anesthesia practice by anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists. Drug addiction is considered the most dangerous and prevalent occupational hazard in anesthesia for anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists. Medical personnel are more susceptible than the general population to substance abuse, particularly anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists who have easy
Nationally, ten to fifteen percent of physicians suffer impairment due to causes as diverse as drug abuse, alcoholism, mental illness, senility and disabling disease (QA Communique 105-110). According to the State of Maryland's ...