re: The story of my friend's murder & his Dad's fight for justice turned into Netflix Doc.

Besides Purdue Pharma another entity that was responsible for the opioid crises is the Joint Commission for Accreditation of Hospitals (JCAH).JCAH came up with the concept of pain as the “5th vital sign”,”pain is what the patient says it is”,.Hospitals are terrified of JCAH,without accreditation they are ineligible for Medicare reimbursement.
Some of the literature we received “educating” us on pain management was found to be written by Purdue Pharma.
The hospital I worked for had a “clipboard nurse” that went around checking our charts and quizzing patients to try and determine if their pain was being adequately controlled.Woe be it for any nurse whose patient claimed to have any pain.Doctors were “counseled” if it was felt they were not addressing patients pain levels adequately.
Therefore,many patients were given excessive doses of narcotics because nurses didn’t want to lose their jobs,Doctors didn’t want their name on a list to be reviewed by JCAH.
Somebody on JCAH staff ,if not JCAH itself was obviously benefitting from Putdue Pharma largesse.
West Virginia filed suit against JCAH as well as Purdue Pharma.
JCAH,of course, denied having any culpability.Those of us that were “in the trenchs know better.Much more emphasis was placed on pain management than other important areas such as infection control.
I was not an ogre that wanted patients to suffer,I occasionally had to talk patients into taking pain meds because I could tell they were in pain but afraid of narcotics for fear of becoming addicted.At the same time I didn’t appreciate being forced into giving narcotics to patients that were obviously comfortable but insisted their pain was 10( scale of 0-10).