Implementing opioid stewardship

Coordinating all the different aspects of opioid stewardship can be challenging. The scope ranges from the pre-assessment clinic, to patient-specific anaesthetic techniques, to advice and support on discharge home after surgery.

In this video you will hear from Amandeep Setra, Pharmacist and Medication Safety Officer, and Dr Jamie Smart, Consultant in Anaesthesia and Pain Medicine, about the most important aspects of opioid stewardship and the methods used to implement them at University College London Hospitals. You will also hear from Dr Nicholas Levy, Consultant in Anaesthesia, about the importance of opioid stewardship in ensuring a safe peri-operative journey for patients.

Supplementary reading is available at the end of the step, where you can find the Terms of Reference for the UCLH Opioid Stewardship Committee, as well as a link to the American Hospital Association Opioid Stewardship Implementation Guide, which lists measures that can be used at a local level for quality improvement within hospitals and health systems.

Successful perioperative care entails interdisciplinary collaboration between surgeons, anaesthetists, nurses, physiotherapists, pharmacists and many more. As a result, education, although important, is neither sufficient nor the most the most effective way of ensuring best evidence-based practice in opioid management is promoted at an institutional level.

The systemic implementation of protocols and guidelines which support opioid stewardship in the areas of multimodal analgesia, opioid prescribing, medication governance, patient education and data collection and analysis of quality metrics is of paramount importance.