Grant: Operating Grant: Opioid Crisis Knowledge Synthesis

Many patients are exposed to opioid medications for the first time after surgery. Abdominal and pelvic surgical procedures are quite painful, and opioids are an important treatment, helping to ease patient suffering and improve recovery. However even short courses of opioid medication can lead to dependence. Surgeons in general have poor prescribing opioid practices - they often prescribe too much medication, and their patients are not informed about safe opioid disposal practices. These are important gaps, and our research will help address them. For our research study we will conduct a systematic review of practice recommendations for abdominal/pelvic surgeons prescribing opioids - we will find guidelines from the literature, from hospitals, surgical societies and other sources, and will summarize and rate the quality of the recommendations. We will have a panel of stakeholders including surgeons, surgeons in training, anaesthetists, pain experts, patients, emergency physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and primary care physicians decide which of the recommendations are the most relevant and important. We will conduct a second literature review to find tools that help physicians and patients implement similar types of recommendations. We will summarize this literature, and present this to our stakeholder panel. We will then convene a meeting of our stakeholders where we will select the most critical recommendations, and will identify tools that can change practice to implement these recommendations. We will use our panel of stakeholders, many of whom play leadership roles in professional and patient organizations, to increase awareness about the recommendations throughout the surgical community in Canada and to develop an action plan to use our research to improve prescribing practices among abdominal/pelvic surgeons without delay.