Health Observance and History
Health Literacy Month is commemorated annually in October. The month was started in 1999 by Helen Osborne to make health-related data more widely available. This national holiday has been observed in America for more than 20 years. Therefore, people and companies promote the value of precise health-related data throughout Health Literacy Month. The commemoration aims to raise awareness regarding obstacles in comprehending health information. The observations led to the discovery of a disconnect between public health specialists and the general public regarding health-related concerns. As a result, it enables individuals to interact better with medical experts, ensuring that they know whom to contact, motivates learning institutions to educate students regarding health literacy, and encourages individuals to participate in health education initiatives.
Overview of the Health Issue
Opioids have been chosen as the public health problem for this analysis. Opioid medications have been utilized for treating acute and persistent discomfort that does not get better with conventional therapies. Opioid medicines are essential therapy tools when appropriately administered. Natural opioids consist of codeine and synthetic opioids like tramadol and heroin, an illegal substance derived from morphine. Therefore, instead of concentrating on treating persistent pain, opioid prescription medication has serious dangers, including diversion, abuse, overuse, dependency, and overdose, which can ultimately result in death. Additionally, according to Duane et al. (2019), from 1999 to 2018, roughly four hundred and fifty thousand people lost their lives to opioid-related danger indicators, such as abuse and overdose, caused mainly by illegal and legally prescribed opioids.
Moreover, opioids were involved in over seventy-five percent of the 91,799 deaths caused by drug overdoses in 2020. Opioid-related deaths climbed by thirty-eight percent between 2019 and 2020, representing a considerable trend. According to statistics, there are three different waves to this increase in deaths caused by opioid overdoses. Rising opioid prescriptions, particularly for natural, semi-synthetic, and synthetic opioids, signaled the beginning of the first wave in the 1990s (Kerrigan & Goldberger, 2020). It began in 2010 as the subsequent wave and was accompanied by a sudden spike in heroin overdose deaths. The third wave of deaths due to opioid overdoses from illegally made synthetic opioids such as tramadol began in 2013. As a result of this ongoing market turmoil, illicitly generated opioids—like a mix of fake pills, heroin, and cocaine—continue to grow in popularity. Nevertheless, these changes encourage abuse, dependency, overdoses, and consequent fatalities. For instance, out of forty-seven thousand six hundred American overdose fatalities in 2017, twenty-eight thousand four hundred sixty-six were attributable to synthetic opioids in America only.
Populations Most Affected by Health Issues
Numerous variables can make someone more susceptible to developing a dependency on drugs or misusing them. These variables include substance misuse in previous and present years, youth, undiagnosed mental illnesses, and even family and social situations. Each of these variables leads people to abuse and become addicted to opioids. These risk variables cause fatality rates from opioid-related overdoses to rise across all demographic groups. For instance, opioid fatalities from overdoses affect nearly all age categories and ethnic/racial groupings. Nevertheless, according to Lippold et al. (2019), black people between the ages of forty-five and fifty-four comprise the most vulnerable demographic.
Ways of Improving the Health Issue
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been committed to combating overdose-related opioid concerns and assisting individuals and families to continue identifying this overdose spread to aid opioid crisis management and safeguarding. Through a three-year-old cooperation contract titled Overdose Data to Action, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has provided financing to public health agencies around the US to help with initiatives to avoid the opioid epidemic.
Monitoring patterns related to earlier surveillance of destructive and non-fatal drug overdoses is one strategy to address this medical problem. The second effort is improving toxicology to monitor fatalities involving multiple substances more effectively. Since doctor-prescribed opioid overdoses and abuse have been caused mainly by doctor-prescribed activities, there are also improved prescription drug surveillance schemes. Other initiatives are using advanced surveillance and prevention techniques. For instance, improving the electronic health record prescriptions procedure supports prescribing opioid drugs (Lossio-Ventura et al., 2022). This strategy guarantees the low-dose and brief-duration formulations that this agency recommended. The prescribers then overrule the settings to ensure no medical decision is ever restricted.
Furthermore, to minimize the opioid turmoil, medical departments can work with authorities to improve linkages with treatment for people susceptible to opioid-related overdoses and those with opioid-related problems. For instance, through these initiatives, the AAP additionally endorses increased Medicaid eligibility restrictions, like drug testing, lockouts, and job requirements, intending to eradicate substance abuse for the needy population served by Medicaid.
Health Issue Message
The main objective of a health message is to alert those most at risk about health-related issues. Consequently, numerous opioid crisis health messages would be delivered to the people most affected when the current opioid epidemic became known using avenues of communication such as mobile devices, advertisements, internet commercials, and even publications. For instance, throughout this Health Literacy Month, messages such as misusing or overdosing on opioids reduce pain temporarily but result in permanent discomfort can be passed on. The potential hazards of ongoing opioid usage or abuse are initially highlighted in this health message. It also outlines the advantages of utilizing other options, which reduce pain and guarantee a secure existence free from linked fatalities caused by overdoses.
References
Duane, M., Okeke, C., Gulaid, A., La Vigne, N., Willison, J. B., & Engelhardt, L. C. C. W. (2019). Comprehensive opioid abuse program assessment: Examining the scope and impact of America’s opioid crisis. https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/101990/comprehensive-opioid-abuse-program-assessment.
Kerrigan, S., & Goldberger, B. A. (2020). Opioids. Principles of forensic toxicology, pp. 347–369. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42917-1_22
Lippold, K. M., Jones, C. M., Olsen, E. O. M., & Giroir, B. P. (2019). Racial/ethnic and age group differences in opioid and synthetic opioid–involved overdose deaths among adults aged 18 years in metropolitan areas—United States, 2015–2017. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 68(43), 967. https://doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6843a3
Lossio-Ventura, J. A., Song, W., Sainlaire, M., Dykes, P. C., & Hernandez-Boussard, T. (2022). Opioid2MME: Standardizing opioid prescriptions to morphine milligram equivalents from electronic health records. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 162, 104739. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2022.104739
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