Article 1: McCauley, J.L., Back, S.E. & Brady, K.T. (2013). Pilot of a brief, web-based educational intervention targeting safe storage and disposal of prescription opioids. Addictive Behaviors 38(2013): 2230-2235.
In this article, McCauley, Back & Brady (2013) report on the results of an open pilot trial focusing on increasing patient knowledge of safe use of prescription opioids. Participants were 62 outpatients at a chronic pain management clinic or dental clinic who were prescribed opioids. All participants received informed consent and then completed the Script Safety intervention, which is an online information service containing information specific to the medication each participant was taking. Telephone interviews were conducted one week and one month following the intervention to assess knowledge retention and comprehension, misuse behaviors, and overall satisfaction. Results showed that satisfaction rates were high, knowledge comprehension and retention rates were also high, and that some self-reported misuse behaviors had decreased at the one-month mark.
The authors clearly outline their reasons for conducting the research, noting the scope of the problem and the role that dental care and primary care practitioners have in mitigating the problems related to opioid addiction and misuse. At the same time, the authors do acknowledge the importance of opioids in pain management. Moreover, the authors explain why they chose the web-based knowledge intervention in their...
The authors also claim that web-based information dissemination is cost-effective. If web-based information is helpful in changing patient behaviors, then public health administrators, policymakers, and healthcare workers can easily and quickly use such methods to reduce harm.
As promising as the results of this study are, there are several limitations due to internal and external validity. One study limitation is that no random assignment was used, and there was no control group. Future research should use a more robust experimental research design. Second, the researchers rely only on self-reports for opioid misuse behaviors and measure those behaviors using parameters like stockpiling and lending pills. Self-reports are not necessarily a reliable means of measuring misuse behaviors, and misuse can occur without stockpiling or lending of pills. In fact, the results show that even though the vast majority of participants knew intellectually that lending pills was misuse, about 20 percent did lend their pills to others. The researchers do acknowledge several of these limitations and provide suggestions for future research that can be helpful for constructing additional studies into the efficacy of knowledge-based interventions to prevent the abuse or misuse of prescription opioids. Because this pilot study uses a web-based information service, it…
