Starting Wednesday, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences will offer a free online course for health care providers on helping patients with chronic pain.
The first year of the weekly course is being funded with a $104,125 grant from Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield and $49,000 in federal grant money from the state drug director's office.
Richard Smith, a UAMS psychiatry professor, said the topics will include how to taper a patient off of opioid pain medication and alternatives for pain treatment, including physical therapy, acupuncture and non-opioid medications.
Each session will include a 20-minute presentation and 40 minutes of questions and answers, he said.
The program is meant to help reduce opioid prescriptions and overdoses in the state.
In 2016, Arkansas ranked second among states in its rate of opioid prescriptions, with 114.6 prescriptions per 100 residents, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Alabama ranked first, with 121 prescriptions per 100 residents.
At a news conference announcing the online course, Gov. Asa Hutchinson said he visited Waldron, in western Arkansas, about a week ago and was surprised to hear that opioids were a bigger problem there than methamphetamine.
He said he was told children in the area were stealing pain pills from their parents' medicine cabinets and using or selling them.
"If you see an abundance of access [to] prescription drugs, then that in and of itself leads to addiction and abuse," Hutchinson said.
To illustrate his point, he pulled out a bottle of hydrocone pills from an old prescription that he said he found in his own medicine cabinet. Out of the 15 pills that had been prescribed, only three had been used, he said.
He turned the bottle with the remaining pills over to Kirk Lane, the state's drug director. Even before the state's latest drug collection event, which happened on Saturday, law enforcement agencies in the state had collected and destroyed more than 131 tons of leftover prescription drugs since 2010, he said.
The online courses will be available to physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, pharmacists and other health care providers. The instructors will include a pain doctor, an addiction psychiatrist, two pharmacists and a physical therapist.
The first class will explain how to read reports from the state's Prescription Drug Monitoring Program giving them information on their prescribing activity over the past six months, Smith said. The first set of such reports went out to prescribers last week.
David Wroten, executive vice president of the Arkansas Medical Society, said the initiative is "one of what will eventually be several educational opportunities that will be available" to physicians and other prescribers.
That includes a three-hour course the Medical Society is developing with UAMS, he said. Since 2016, the state Medical Board has required newly licensed physicians to attend three hours of instruction on prescribing within two years of obtaining their license.
A regulation passed by the board last month will also require physicians to take an hour of instruction each year on prescribing opioids and benzodiazepines, which treat anxiety.
"We have a lot of chronic pain patients in Arkansas," Wroten said. "If there are new methods available, different things that can be done, physicians want to know about those."
Metro on 05/01/2018