Opioid Stewardship Part I

Opioid stewardship provides an organized framework to reduce risks while preserving effective pain management through safe prescribing and education (Holowaty et al., 2024). This approach is essential in long-term care, where homes must balance pain control with substance use risks as they increasingly care for younger residents alongside older adults. In this podcast, we delve into these topics with the BetterLTC team and inpatient pharmacist Kelsey Dumont to highlight critical issues such as the need for destigmatizing language, exploring and understanding family fears about opioid addiction, and the balancing of pain management with quality of life.