PPAHS

Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety is a national advocacy force for addressing patient health and safety priorities that are shared by patients, physicians, regulators, and industry. PPAHS facilitates patient-to-clinician dialogue by improving patient adherence, removing barriers, material translation, and promoting access. By doing so, we seek to ensure that the best practices, communication skills, medications, medical inventions, and technology that can improve care and reduce costs are employed.

“While PCA may be the safest mode of opioid delivery it is true that regardless of the route of administration, respiratory depression may still occur. To help prevent such incidents from happening, it should be remembered that some of the most significant strides in medicine and surgery are directly attributable to anesthesiology’s advances in patient monitoring.”

Dr. Jason McKeown, Associate Professor, Medical Director – Inpatient Pain Service, University of Alabama School of Medicine

“Monitoring patients for how much carbon dioxide they are breathing out with capnography provides us with the earliest possible indicator to detect the onset of opioid-induced respiratory depression. Continuously electronically monitoring with capnography will save lives.”

Dr. Cheryl Wibbens, Chief Medical Officer at Memorial Hospital