Although we often focus on dental hygiene and oral care, the professionals providing oral health care across the Commonwealth have a much bigger role to play in the overall health and wellbeing of our population. In the wake of the opioid epidemic, dental care teams are centered in the landscape of pain-relieving medications and responsible prescribing for Kentuckians.
Dental providers are highly trained in their field and those who prescribe controlled substances are required to receive additional training on safe prescribing, but we know oral surgery to correct dental problems is common, and dentists often prescribe a course of opioid painkillers after surgery. While these are typically milder opioids, the drugs may still trigger addiction for some individuals. Due to the risk associated with opioid prescriptions, guidance has been offered in recent years from the American Dental Association for opioid prescriptions to help dentists become more aware of their role in the opioid addiction epidemic.
Through focused efforts to reduce the risk of over prescribing opioids for dental pain, we have seen a reduction in the number of pain-killers prescribed by dentists in Kentucky, and the length of these prescriptions. Now advocates in Kentucky are looking ahead to mitigate the effects of the opioid epidemic and focus on prevention – an effort that dentists and their teams can take part in.
Over the course of the next 18 years, Kentucky will see an influx of dollars from a large-scale settlement with opioid manufacturers in response to the opioid epidemic. Hundreds of millions of dollars will be split in half, with 50% of opioid settlement funds going to the Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission, which will accept applications and approve grant projects focused on preventing and mitigating the impacts of substance use. The other half of the funding will go directly to counties, cities, consolidated local governments, and urban county governments.
Community members are key advocates to hold their elected officials accountable and ensure settlement dollars are spent in a meaningful way. Connecting with those who are making decisions around funding, organizations and agencies working directly to provide substance use treatment, safe housing, reintegration into communities, and those working further upstream to prevent addiction in the first place are critical steps in allocating settlement dollars.
To help community members prepare for these conversations, Bloom Kentucky has developed the Kentucky Opioid Settlement Planning Toolkit for communities to get local partners around the same table to start to build hopefulness and readiness for change.
Every community across the Commonwealth can invest in a future where substance misuse is no longer plaguing Kentuckians and their families.
