With a wave of opioid overdoses sweeping across the province, and Canada at large, the Interior Health Authority announced Tuesday that all emergency health centres in its jurisdiction would be receiving take home naloxone kits to distribute to patients.
Although most emergency rooms already had naloxone to use in case of emergency at the hospital, the new take home naloxone kit program will allow staff to train opioid users in how to administer the potentially life-saving shot on their own, or to another, explained Dr. Silvina Mema with the IHA.
“The goal is for everyone who is discharged from the hospital after suffering from an overdose to get a naloxone kit,” said Mema.
Naloxone is a drug, which when injected intravenously (with a syringe) can slow down the effects of an opioid induced drug overdose.
Two people have died from opioid overdoses in Merritt this year — although its not clear whether those deaths were related to growing concern over fentanyl (a potent opioid, often mixed with heroin).
In Merritt, the kits will be available at the Nicola Valley Health Centre — although there is not enough to supply a kit to everyone who wants one, said Mema.
“The supply of these kits is not endless,” she explained, adding that for the time being, as the take home kits were being provided to the IHA through the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, they would only be available to patients or drug users.
Mema said a long term goal for the IHA was to produce the kits themselves, so that there would be a greater supply for health organizations, or individuals who know drug users, to learn how to administer the drug.
But while the take home kits is an emergency measure aimed at harm reduction in the interim, a longer-term strategy for dealing with the wave of opioid abuse is needed, said Dr. Mandy Manak, who runs the Interior Chemical Dependency Office in Merritt.
Without a long term strategy for dealing with opioid addiction, simply providing naloxone kits to those who OD is like saving someone from drowning, but not teaching them to swim, said Manak.
“They’ll hop back in that water,” she said.
Though she applauded the increased availability of naloxone kits, Manak pointed to the availability of prescription drugs in Merritt as an area of concern for her, noting that a number of patients who come through her clinic are prescribed a deadly cocktail of sedatives, opioids, and stimulants.
It’s far too easy to get a prescription in Merritt, said Manak, adding that the risk of overdose is greatly increased when sedatives are combined with opioids.
But while the IHA is looking at a longterm strategy for dealing with the opioid crisis, Mema couldn’t confirm whether the authority was tracking which doctors are prescribing the pain medication.
“We are working on a number of different strategies, take home naloxone kits is part of our harm reduction strategy,” Mema explained.
But Manak was hopeful that new rules set out by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia on June 1 for responsibly prescribing opioids, sedatives, and stimulants could have a mitigating effect.
Under the new standards, physicians must first check their patients’ current medications through an online portal called PharmaNet, which tracks how many, and what kind of prescriptions are assigned to an individual.
The rules also call for physicians to administer an annual drug test and/or random pill counts for patients taking opioids over a long period of time.
