Community Care Chronic Pain Initiative

In August 2011, Project Lazarus partnered with NCCN to implement the Chronic Pain Initiative (CPI). Over the next two years, CPI will provide a means for clinical education in pain management and substance abuse treatment in all 100 counties. Read more...

The Chronic Pain Initiative seeks to address these problems through a broad partnership that includes CCNC, the North Carolina Hospital Association, local hospitals and EDs, health departments, primary care doctors, faith-based programs and law enforcement.  CCNC is providing financial support and tapping into CCNC’s local networks – professionals expert in local conditions and resources for treatment.

The effort is modeled on a highly successful Wilkes County overdose prevention program known as “Project Lazarus.” In response to some of the highest overdose death rates in the country, Project Lazarus developed improved emergency room approaches to reversing respiratory depression due to opioid toxicity. While Project Lazarus educated doctors on safe opioid prescribing, Wilkes Regional Medical Center changed its ED policies around narcotic prescribing and established discharge planning regimes that more effectively manage pain control.

These are the results on the impact that Project Lazarus and the Chronic Pain Initiative may have had in Wilkes County. Overdose deaths are down 69% in Wilkes County between 2009 and 2011. Wilkes is still a little higher than the national average, but nowhere near the 6th worst in the nation we were in 2008. At the same time, there was no meaningful change in the percent of Wilkes residents getting an opioid pain reliever (7.5% to 8% each month; state average is 5.75%). In 2011, not a single Wilkes County resident died from a prescription opioid from a prescriber within the county, down from 82% in 2008. Substance abuse related ED admissions dropped by 15.3 percent from 2008 to 2010.

 

 

 

Sources: Wilkes Co. Health Department; NC SCHS; NC CSRS; CDC Wonder