fentanyl in ambulances

[nabraxas]

Oct 19, 2012

Ambulance Victoria may stop using the powerful painkiller Fentanyl, amid an independent audit into its drug-handling procedures and concerns about growing community misuse of the drug.

Two paramedics have been accused of stealing the opioid analgesic from ambulance stations and substituting it with water.

At the same time it has been revealed there have been at least 15 Fentanyl-related deaths over the last year, and drug support agencies say it is in-demand on the black market.

Ambulance Victoria chief executive Greg Sassella told 7:30 Victoria there is no evidence to link the deaths to the alleged thefts by paramedics, but the use of the drug is being reconsidered.

"We've got to decide, we have very good reason for using Fentanyl," he said.

"It's a very effective drug for our patients and for the sake of one or two individuals who are misappropriating the drug or replacing it, is that sufficient to then deny all of our hundreds of thousands of patients that medication?

"Of course, that is something we're going to have to think about."

 

i'd be pissed off if i was in pain & the paramedics couldn't give me strong enough pain killers, but i'd be even more pissed off if the pain killers they gave me were water.

[gtarman]

I remember seeing this on the news actually. I was surprised to learn that Fentanyl - which the news story I saw described as being, "stronger than morpheine" (no kidding, it's pretty much the most potent opioid there is - roughly 100 times stronger to be precise) was used on humans at all.

I know it's used on big game animals and shit, but hey. It would be the same with any opioid. You don't need to stop carrying them, you need to start storing them responsibly and with a high level of accountability. Paramedics need strong painkillers in their toolkit.

Edited October 20, 2012 by gtarman

[Anodyne]

I was surprised to learn that Fentanyl - .... was used on humans at all.

 

There's good reasons for using a more potent opioid:

*less toxicity - for treating severe pain in someone with serious opiate tolerance, grams of a morphine-strength opiate might be needed, so a drug with microgram activity is a handy alternative. Fentanyl is very mu-receptor-specific, and less side-effects are reported than for equivalent doses of morphine.

*lower volume - makes fentanyl and analogues good candidates for epidurals and other procedures where a small injection volume is a plus.

*high potency means it can be administered transdermally - you can fit a weeks' worth of fentanyl onto a bandaid-or-two's surface area, which is nifty in many ways.

I think it's supposed to be about the same as morphine cost-wise (i.e. cost per equivalent dose, not cost per gram), so there's not really any reason not to use it. If the medical staff didn't have fentanyl to steal, they'd just swipe the morphine - so the argument in that article is ridiculous.