Opioid Prescription Patterns in Pediatric Orthopedics Following Closed Reduction and Percutaneous Pinning for Supracondylar Humerus Fractures.

BACKGROUND

There is currently an alarming upward trend in the use of prescription opioids in the pediatric population. Previous medical use of prescription opioids has shown to correlate to non-medical use of prescription opioids. To combat this, institutions have started to look at prescribing patterns to understand and eventually standardize a pain protocol to reduce unnecessary analgesics after surgery. Opioids continue to be used widely for postoperative pain control in orthopedic patients. Therefore, this study examined the prescription patterns within a large pediatric orthopedic hospital consortium after closed reduction and percutaneous pinning for supracondylar humerus fractures.

METHODS

A retrospective analysis was performed in order to understand the prescribing variability in analgesics for this patient population better. Descriptive statistics and chi-squared analysis were used to evaluate for prescribing patterns.

RESULTS

Narcotic medications were prescribed postoperatively to 49.6% of patients. There was no difference in narcotic prescription with length of stay or severity of fracture. Additionally, there were several documented prescribing errors, most commonly by a junior orthopedic resident.

CONCLUSIONS

There is significant variability in prescribing patterns among physicians after pediatric supracondylar humerus fractures. Understanding the patterns and implementing a more standardized approach to pain control may help to combat prescribing errors.