Drug Diversion Reporting and Response: A Policy Analysis

Despite the significant improvements made to address addiction and drug diversion by healthcare personnel, the issue continues to be problematic for most healthcare facilities. Current literature suggests that healthcare institutions incorporate early drug diversion and addiction education, implementation of effective policies and procedures, and continuous drug screening will strongly aid in decreasing the prevalence of drug diversion by healthcare providers. Among all the different types of healthcare providers, anesthesia providers continue to be at a disproportionately higher risk for addiction and drug diversion when compared to other providers (AANA, 2016). The stress of a demanding profession, personality, and easy access to addictive medications all play a part in this statistic, thus, are responsible for the increased risk of addiction and drug diverting by anesthesia providers (Wright et al., 2012). The disease of addiction and the act of drug diversion is a multifaceted problem that affects the healthcare provider, coworkers, hospitals, patients, and families. Therefore, it is imperative that healthcare institutions have policies and procedures in place that comply with current best practice guidelines regarding employee drug diversion. The purpose of this DNP project was to perform a policy analysis on the institution of interest drug diversion reporting and response policy. A SWOT analysis was performed and after a thorough review of the evidence, a set of best practice guidelines regarding a drug diversion policy were used to compare the participating facility’s current policy for reporting drug diversion in an employee. An executive summary of policy analysis findings and suggested revisions to the institution’s current policy was presented to the key participants