Healthcare workers including nurses and behavioral health workers have two times the risk for drug overdose compared to people who don’t work in the field, a new study shows.
The team looked at data from 176,000 healthcare workers over the age of 26 between 2008 and 2019. They compared them to 1.6 million people who didn’t work in healthcare. During the study, about .07% of the health workers died from overdose, which is defined as taking more than the recommended amount of a medicine or drug.
Home health care workers have double the odds of dying from overdose, while registered nurses are about 50% more likely to die from overdose. Researchers also looked at health technicians and doctors who weren’t at a higher risk of dying from drug overdose.
Approximately 85% of overdoses were linked to opioids, said Mark Olfson, a professor of psychiatry, medicine and law at Columbia University Medical Center. He was part of the research team from multiple institutions.
“Many times healthcare workers are in positions where, despite their efforts, they have very little ability to control the outcome,” Olfson told HealthDay.
Why the connection to opioids, specifically? Access to the medications may be easier for nurses. Additionally, healthcare workers may be more prone to physical injuries that may drive them to use the medicines, he said.
“They have very high rates of occupational injuries, among the very highest of all the occupations in the United States,” Olfson said.
“The question becomes whether these findings provide a rationale for forcing greater oversight concerning the administration of these drugs, of controlled substances, and also their disposal for unused portions of drugs,” Olfson added.
People who work in the health field are a unique group of workers because they care for others and may have to sacrifice their own well-being to do so, said Smita Das, MD, PhD, chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Addiction Psychiatry and a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine.
“As we see overdose rates continue to increase in general in the time period of this study, the unique impact on healthcare has not been examined before,” Das said.
