To create a proper care plan for a certain social group, it is of crucial importance to define various peculiarities concerning the target group. Hence, the group chosen for this assignment consists of people who struggle with opioid addiction as a result of a medical prescription for severe painkillers like Oxycodone (OxyContin). The average age of the group is 27-35 years, and the patients are mostly male. Such a decision was made because according to the researchers, Purdue Pharma as an owner of OxyContin, spent more than two decades promoting the drug to doctors, eventually leading to the opioid epidemic outbreak across the state (Whalen, 2018).
Hence, once the process of aggressive marketing had been over, thousands of fellow residents were left with a severe addiction to opioids and no access to the medication supply, trying to find relief by injecting other drugs.
When speaking of the major health risks that are to be addressed in terms of intervention, such notions as opioid addiction, central nervous system malfunction, and vital functions suppression should be taken into consideration. Another major risk tackled during the intervention is the fact of people using illicit substances like heroin to satisfy their need for opioids. As far as the intervention is concerned, the plan itself will be based on two pillars: cognitive-behavioral therapy and assessment and medical treatment of withdrawal, as it is the combination of these factors that might help the group deal with the issue. Thus, to implement the following intervention, the following steps will be employed:
- Detailed examination of the group representatives’ health history and painkiller abuse patterns to define the scope of the intervention required
- Establishment of a trusting relationship with group representatives, i.e., expressing no judgment considering one’s lifestyle and habits, validating the group’s experience
- Explicit management of the patients’ patterns of opioid withdrawal medical treatment (in case no treatment was provided before the intervention – assessment of the scope of the issue)
- Administration of Methadone therapy controlled by volunteers engaged in the process.
- Introduction of cognitive-behavioral therapy and education content on the subject of drug misuse
- Monitoring and control throughout the treatment course (Agada et al., 2020).
As a result of the following plan, the expected result may be then outlined as follows:
- After the intervention, patients are aware of the risks connected to opioid misuse, and they are not willing to abuse the number of painkillers prescribed for the sake of addiction reward.
- The group engaged in the intervention displays willingness to receive proper psychological counseling to eradicate addiction in the long term.
- The volunteers engaged in the process establish a proper educational channel for the addiction risk groups in the community (Rigg et al., 2018).
The following outcome is not to be achieved within a few months. One of the core issues in terms of such an intervention is the fact that the target patient group for the endeavor is frequently unwilling to collaborate with practitioners. Because the whole strategy of the following plan is collaboration, it would be safe to say that much time will be needed to build a trusting relationship with the patients for them to share relevant information about their life. Moreover, a certain amount of time will be spent on finding resources such as human resources (volunteers, counselors, nurses, etc.) and medical provision (Methadone). Hence, the results of the following intervention should be visible approximately a year after launching.
References
Agada, U., Chaudhri, N., Conlon, M., Dada, C., Green, L., & Guirguis, A. (2020). The prescription opioid addiction and abuse epidemic: how it happened and what we can do about it. The Pharmaceutical Journal, 14, 34.
Rigg, K. K., McLean, K., Monnat, S. M., Sterner III, G. E., & Verdery, A. M. (2018). Opioid misuse initiation: implications for intervention. Journal of Addictive Diseases, 37(3-4), 111-122.
Whalen, J. (2018). Purdue Pharma to stop promoting OxyContin to US doctors. The Wall Street Journal.