Scientific articleOpioid Consumption Following Outpatient Upper Extremity Surgery
Section snippets
Materials and Methods
This prospective cohort study examined patients from a Midwestern group of 5 private practice hand surgeons. We invited patients scheduled for elective outpatient upper extremity surgery at a freestanding outpatient surgery center from February through November 2010 to participate in the study at the time of scheduling surgery. To be included in the study, subjects had to speak English, be 18 to 90 years of age, be able to give informed consent, not be pregnant, not currently take any
Results
A total of 287 subjects were recruited and agreed to be contacted by phone within 14 days after surgery. Despite multiple attempts to contact subjects by phone, 36 patients failed to answer or respond to messages. We deemed these patients to have electively withdrawn from the study. One patient canceled surgery. We collected and analyzed information for the remaining 250 subjects. The average age of subjects recruited was 54 years. Most patients involved in the study were women; however, there
Discussion
A recently published article found that patients often do not take medications as prescribed.9 Most of our patients did not take all of their prescribed opioid analgesics, either because they were no longer in pain or because they experienced side effects. A total of 77% (193) of patients took 15 or fewer opioid analgesics, whereas 45% (113) took fewer than 5 pills and some took none at all. The total amount of unused opioid analgesics from these 250 patients was 4,639 tablets. Bates et al10
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