North Carolina Updates Dental Opioid Action Plan, Dental School Incorporates Pharmacist

In November 2022, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services released an updated North Carolina Dental Opioid Action Plan designed to provide strategies for dentists, patients, and the community to address the opioid epidemic. The plan, which includes actions such as limiting inappropriate access to prescription medications, increasing community awareness about misuse, reducing diversion of illicit drugs, and measuring the impact of these strategies, is intended to reduce the oversupply and overuse of opioids. The revised plan calls for continuing education and resources for practicing dentists, with an emphasis on “safer pain management and identifying people at risk of substance use disorder and referring for diagnosis and treatment.”

The University of North Carolina Dental School had already begun addressing the issue by integrating clinical pharmacy into the dental school’s clinics. Kimberly Sanders, PharmD, assistant professor in the Division of Practice Advancement and Clinical Education at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, has a shared appointment as an assistant professor at the UNC Adams School of Dentistry. There, Dr Sanders works to foster the partnership between pharmacy and dentistry through “initiatives to develop, implement, and evaluate clinical pharmacy services in dental practice clinics as well as creating a longitudinal interprofessional education curriculum,” according to the Eshelman School of Pharmacy.

Dr Sanders works with dental students, often discussing patient treatment plans. Students learn how to consider alternatives to opioids in treating pain, how to review patients’ medical charts, and how to check for a history of prescription abuse. This is the first partnership between dental and pharmacy schools in the state and could pave the way for future collaborations between the two professions to reduce the misuse of opioids in North Carolina.