Hospitals Could Do More For Survivors Of Opioid Overdoses, Study Suggests
Researchers say hospitals are missing an opportunity to help people with opioid addiction get into treatment by not doing enough when they show up in emergency rooms after an overdose.
To get a sense of how severe the opioid crisis is in the U.S., you can look at the number of fatal overdoses — more than 33,000 in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That means, on average, 91 people are dying after overdosing on opioids each day. And for every fatal overdose, there are believed to be roughly 30 nonfatal overdoses.
Clinicians and researchers trying to get a handle on the epidemic look at those nonfatal experiences as opportunities to jump in and figure out whether there is overprescribing Tuesday in the , suggests such interventions don't happen often enough.
