Agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration have been pushing harder to investigate cases of nursing-home staff giving powerful medications to patients without a doctor’s prescription. But if that sounds all well and good, some say it’s just the nub of a more-complicated situation.
Trade groups for nursing homes and hospice-care facilities say “patients have been left to ‘languish in pain’ while nursing homes and pharmacies try to find ways to comply with DEA regulations requiring physicians, in most cases, to write prescriptions,” the WSJ reports this morning. The industry groups are pushing for a change in the law and the issue will be taken up at a Senate hearing today.
The DEA has been ramping up efforts to fight prescription-drug abuse, which some experts say may surpass the abuse of illegal drugs, the article says. In nursing-home cases, DEA has been acting out of concern for patients, according to a letter to lawmakers in December from an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department, of which the DEA is part.
But the industry groups say long-term facilities can’t afford doctors to write every prescription. “DEA’s reliance on hard copy prescriptions and failure to acknowledge the role of nursing in long-term care and hospice place additional burdens on prescribers, pharmacists and nurses and can substantially delay and in some cases, impede access to appropriate pain medication,” industry backers said in a brief quoted by the WSJ.
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