B+ grade for West Virginia in study of pain treatment policies

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — West Virginia again finishes with a ‘B+’ grade on an annual report card measuring access to pain treatment, the Achieving Balance in State Pain Policy report from the University of Wisconsin Pain and Policy Studies Group.

As the federal government and all states, including West Virginia, take additional steps to rein in opioid abuse by, in part, enacting more stringent prescribing guidelines, advocates for cancer patients and others are calling for caution.

“What we ask of policymakers is while this work, this very important work is going on, that we not forget the other side of the equation, that we not forget the cancer patient, cancer survivor, and those folks that legitimately, legally need these pain medications,” said David Woodmansee, associate director of state and local campaigns for the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network.

In 2014, West Virginia lead the U.S. in drug overdose deaths, according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Opioids, primarily prescription painkillers and heroin, were the main causes of those overdose deaths.

Governments, Woodmansee argued, have dual obligations to establish a system of controls to prevent abuse, trafficking and diversion of narcotic drugs while, at the same time, ensuring their medical availability to people who need such drugs for pain management health reasons.

“These legislators put policies in place in reaction to a crisis that we have and they don’t understand sometimes the unintended consequences that it has on legitimate patients, legitimate patient needs,” Woodmansee told MetroNews.

In the policy report jointly funded by the American Cancer Society and the American Cancer Society Action Network, every state is assigned a letter grade from ‘A’ to ‘F,’ based on whether state pain policies enhance or restrict access to pain care, including the use of pain medications.

The states with ‘A’ grades are Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, accounting for 19 percent of the total U.S. population.

West Virginia has hovered around the ‘B+’ mark for years.

According to Woodmansee, the changes necessary to potentially move the Mountain State up on the grading scale could be made within regulations from the West Virginia Board of Medicine and West Virginia Board of Osteopathic Medicine.

“There’s some ambiguous provisions in there that, if that can just be cleaned up a little bit, tightened up, then West Virginia could easily slide up to an ‘A’ because there a lot of good laws and regulations in place in West Virginia right now,” Woodmansee said.

The American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network is the nonprofit, nonpartisan advocacy affiliate for the American Cancer Society.





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