We’re committed to reducing substance abuse in Arizona and we’re consistently reminding the public to get rid of old medication to reduce the number of unintentional poisonings. With more Arizonans dying every year from misuse and abuse of prescription painkillers than car crashes- it’s more important than ever to educate health care providers… so we’re hosting a forum to discuss this increasingly urgent public health issue. About 30% of all prescriptions painkillers are written in emergency rooms… so we’ve set up the all-day event with partners from emergency rooms, physicians, nurses, hospital management and Indian Health Services Wednesday, July 18th at the Fiesta Resort Conference Center, 2100 South Priest Drive in Tempe to help increase awareness and identify solutions. Here’s a fact sheet with more info about this increasingly dangerous public health threat.
Posts Tagged ‘emergency rooms’
Prescription Painkiller Forum
July 17th, 2012National Poison Prevention Week
April 5th, 2012This week marks the 50th anniversary of National Poison Prevention Week. For the first time ever- poisoning surpassed car crashes as the number one cause of injury deaths in AZ and more than 2,000 kids had to go to emergency rooms last year from unintentional poisoning. Kids under 5 had the highest rates of non-fatal emergency department visits from poisoning. For more information on poisoning in Arizona, check out our recently posted Poisonings Among Arizona Residents, 2010 PowerPoint.
Nationally, more than 60,000 young children end up in emergency rooms because they got into medicines while their parent or caregiver was not looking. The new Up and Away and Out of Sight educational program was created to remind families of the importance of safe medicine storage.
Phoenix Magazine also wrote a story that explains prescription drug abuse from the perspective of someone battling chronic pain.. it’s called Bad Medicine and is in the Top Docs issue… so hopefully a lot of people will read it, take stock of their “inventory” and dump it before there are more accident poisonings.
