Prescription Opioid Safety Toolkit

Investigators

Professor Suzanne Nielsen, Professor Paul Dietze, Ms Monika Boogs, Mr Jarrod McMaugh and Dr Louisa Picco.

Our project will provide the essential tools for consumers to be empowered to have safer and effective use of prescription opioids. Australia has one of the highest rates of opioid dependence and overdose in the world, with most of this harm due to prescription opioids.

A decade of research has developed the individual tools to support safer use of prescription opioids. This project aims to leverage that investment by taking these individual tools and developing an Opioid Safety Toolkit. The Toolkit will be codesigned with consumers and medicines experts through an iterative co-design process. The co-designed Toolkit will then be made widely accessible through a national dissemination strategy which will include a consumer communications strategy and dissemination via Australian community pharmacies. We will leverage technological solutions to provide consumers with direct access to this Toolkit at the time of opioid supply.

Project Update

This project is now complete. For more details of the completed project, follow this link

You can access the Opioid Safety Toolkit at https://saferopioiduse.com.au/

The co-designed Opioid Safety Toolkit includes personalised information and evidence based resources for consumers, carers and healthcare professionals. The Toolkit has been rigorously tested as part of a randomised controlled trial which showed it was acceptable to consumers and improves safety behaviours including requesting naloxone. The Toolkit is currently being disseminated nationally via community pharmacies, in addition to other dissemination modalities being adopted online and face-to-face through our project partners and other consumer and health professional organisations.

Project Funder  

Department of Health and Aged Care

Project Partners

A collaboration between Monash Addiction Research Centre (MARC), the Burnet Institute, the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia and Painaustralia.