Submitted by: Tracy Wall, Regional Sales Director, Carlisle Medical, Inc.
The 2022 CDC Clinical Practice Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Pain has been updated and expanded from the 2016 Guidelines. The CDC Clinical Practice Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Pain was created to help clinicians make informed decisions regarding pain. This Guideline is voluntary and was developed because the CDC recognized that primary care and outpatient clinicians needed current recommendations to improve pain management and patient safety when prescribing opioids for patients 18 years or older. There are 12 recommendations for the CDC Opioid Prescribing Guidelines (2022) which can be grouped into the four following areas:
- Determining whether or not to initiate opioids for pain
- Selecting opioids and determining opioid dosages
- Deciding the duration of the initial opioid prescription
- Assessing risk and addressing potential harms of opioid dose
Five Guiding Principles
The 2022 Guideline has five guiding principles for implementing recommendations which can be summarized below:
- Acute, subacute, and chronic pain needs to be appropriately assessed and treated independently of whether opioids are part of a treatment regimen. Acute pain guidance has been expanded with the addition of management for subacute pain.
- Recommendations are voluntary and intended to support, not supplant, individualized, person-centered care, which needs to remain flexible. The 2022 Clinical Practice Guideline does not support patient abandonment, abrupt discontinuation of opioids, or rapid dosage tapering. Clinicians should discuss tapering or discontinuing opioids with the patient prior to initiating changes.
- A multimodal and multidisciplinary approach to pain management is critical.
- Special attention should be given to avoid misapplying this clinical practice guideline beyond its intended purpose. Misapplication can lead to unintended and potentially harmful consequences for patients.
- Clinicians, practices, health systems, and payers should vigilantly attend to health inequities.
The Guideline also broadens the scope from primary care physicians to include those whose practice areas include the prescribing of opioids in outpatient settings (hospital, ER, dental, occupational, etc.). The Guideline describes an approach to implementing shared decision-making for treatment changes between the patient and the clinician. The recommendations do not apply to end-of-life care, palliative care, cancer-related pain treatment, or pain management related to sickle cell disease.
Access the full CDC Guideline at https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/rr/rr7103a1.htm?s_cid=rr7103a1_w.
Submitted By:
Tracy Wall, Regional Sales Director, Carlisle Medical, Inc.
tracy.wall@carlislemedical.com