Quantity: reduced
It is not mandatory to prescribe quantities as per the original pack size. Smaller quantities of medication should be prescribed per prescription by clinicians who are concerned about the supply of hypno-sedative drugs to their patients.
Referral
Referrals to allied health practitioners and or psychologists should be encouraged as part of a multimodal system of chronic pain management in which the provision of psychological and physical therapies supersede the emphasis on prescribing.
Rotation of opioids
Opioid rotation provides a rapid and effective means of reducing the total daily oral morphine equivalent (OME) daily dose. For patients on more than 100 mg OME, opioid rotation can be used to rapidly reduce the OME to less than 100 mg. It relies on the fact that patients do not usually demonstrate cross tolerance between opioids so converting a patient from one opioid to another necessitates a reduction in dose of the second opioid to approximately fifty percent of the equivalent dose of the first opioid. For instance, if a patient has been prescribed 60 mg b.d. of "Targin" this equates to approximately 200 mg OME. If the patient were to be transferred to 200 mg daily of a long acting morphine, e.g. "MS Contin" or "Kapanol" the patient would likely suffer an overdose because of the lack of cross tolerance between opioids. Therefore, as per the usual practice of only prescribing 50% of the calculated OME for the second opioid, the patient should be started on only 100 mg daily of long acting morphine. It can be seen in this example that converting from oxycodone to morphine has reduced the overall OME from 200 mg to 100 mg. A reduction in OME is an important step in trending the legacy patient to a position of reduced risk of death.
Staged supply
Staged supply denotes the practice of requiring that a patient attend a pharmacy or other dosing point on a regular basis to receive a daily dose of the medication in question. Clinicians can arrange staged supply of any drug, not just Suboxone or methadone. Therefore, staged supply of opioids would be entirely reasonable as part of a plan to manage high dose or high-risk opioid prescribing.
Tapering of opioids
Patients can be weaned off high doses of opioids by gradually reducing their dose over weeks to months. This process, called tapering, is usually done in conjunction with opioid rotation.
The process of tapering involves the following steps.
• The daily dose of short acting opioids is incorporated into a long acting dose of equivalent opioid.
• If multiple opioid combinations are used, then all opioids are converted into an oral morphine equivalent and an opioid rotation is performed as described above.
• One long acting opioid is commenced
• The taper starts at a rate of approximately ten percent per week of the original starting dose
• The use of short acting opioids or prn doses is strictly limited.
The recommended taper rate is a reduction of ten per cent of the original dose of opioid per week or fortnight such that over a period of ten to twenty weeks patients can be completely weaned off their opioids if appropriate or otherwise weaned down to a dose of less than 100 mg OME.