Amid Opioid Crisis, Walgreens Adds Mental Health Training For Pharmacists
Walgreens plans to increase mental health and substance abuse training for hundreds of pharmacists and staff at its drugstores amid the U.S. opioid epidemic.
Walgreens has partnered with the National Council for Behavioral Health and the American Pharmacists Association to make training available to Walgreens pharmacy staffers in “mental health first aid,” which those involved say will help assist patients suffering from mental health conditions or substance abuse.
“With the growing need for services and resources to help those living with mental health conditions, as well as substance use and addiction, we can play an important role by giving our pharmacists and certain team members the training to help those in crisis,” Walgreens Boots Alliance co-chief operating officer Alex Gourlay said in a statement.
The strategy is the latest from big healthcare companies to ratchet up screening for patients with substance abuse and mental health conditions in the wake of the deadly opioid epidemic. Major health insurers like Anthem, Cigna and UnitedHealth Group are closely monitoring prescriptions and making sure physicians in their networks adhere to certain protocols and recommended dosages.
By improving mental health education, screening and literacy, companies could also be engaging in risk management.
Drug makers and other healthcare companies like Walgreens that have been involved in the production, sale and distribution of opioids may have reason to fear “a tobacco-style master settlement agreement,” a report last year from Fitch Ratings said. Other companies that distributed or sold opioids also face some risk, including drugstore chains like CVS Health, which is also at some financial risk because it owns the pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) Caremark, Fitch said. Other PBMs, including Express Scripts now owned by Cigna and UnitedHealth Group’s OptumRx, could also face some risk.
Walgreens has increased mental health services in recent years as the company has added more medical treatments and wellness services to become a retail health destination for consumers. Three years ago, Walgreens expanded mental health services to include access to behavioral health treatment via Breakthrough, a unit of telemedicine firm MDLive. Walgreens also expanded customer options for treatment, screenings and awareness through its mental health platform, Walgreens.com/mentalhealth, which was launched in May of 2016.
The additional “mental health first aid” training administered by the National Council, trains “participants in mental health literacy, understanding risk factors and warning signs for mental health and addiction concerns, and strategies for how to help someone in both crisis and non-crisis situations,” Walgreens and the council said. “One in five people experiences a mental health or substance use issue in a given year and it’s likely that most of those individuals use a pharmacy’s services during that year,” the National Council for Behavioral Health’s CEO Linda Rosenberg said.
If you are a chronic pain pts or a pt that has a medical necessity for controlled substances and you patronize Walgreens.. you may soon start receiving the recommendation to seek out mental health services – for your opiate use disorder… you see that they have changed or in the processing of changing the nomenclature… There seems to no more addiction or dependency but anyone using a opiate (legally/Illegally) > 90 days.. is now being diagnosed with a “opiate use disorder” diagnosis.
You see, the Tobacco Settlement money ..it has been paid out on a annual basis from the tobacco companies and that will be drying up in another 4-5 yrs and a lot of bureaucracies have become “financially dependent/addicted” on this money and they face the possibility when the money dries up to raise taxes, cut budgets or find another source of revenue… and now everyone and their brother is filing suits against the major pharmas, wholesalers, and major chain pharmacies… but there is more deep pockets within the Insurance industry- which includes the PBM’s. So all of those within these industries are trying to CYA there “deep pockets” from all the law firms that are working on a contingency basis with suing everyone that is involved with the controlled substance distribution system. These bureaucracies are “hiring” all of these law firms on a contingency basis… so they have nothing to lose.. since the law firms only get paid if they win a settlement.
Filed under: General Problems
And I will tell them to fuck off. There job is not to diagnosis me. It is like they dont want to fill these prescription because they cannt trust there own damn employees.
1 in 5 experiences a mental health or substance use issue? Maybe mental health. But the estimated 20 million people in the U.S. with addiction to any substance out of 326 million is not even close to 1 in 5. And the bulk of those addicted are using tobacco and alcohol. Walgreens doesn’t dispense alcohol, last I checked. The main drugs of abuse they dispense are opioids and benzodiazepines. There are about 3 million who abuse these, or 1 in 100. The vast majority of them do not obtain their drugs of choice from pharmacies. How does Walgreens deem these measures cost-effective or even logical?
They want to help with our health care, serve up the medications we get from our medical doctors in a fine, organized prescribed way. And NOW fold to an insane agenda regarding the demonization of opiates, an NOW any medicine at all, and they want to gauge MY mental health? Yeah, …right.
Well let’s be real for a minute here. Walgreen’s probably thinks its stupid as well. What this is is the DEA or Whoever, …with a big big gun at their heads – drumming up business, …or.