The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) has announced an upcoming free webinar, “Understanding the CDC Guidelines for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain and Other National Strategies,” for September 22, 2016. This free educational session will outline the changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) opioid prescription guidelines. This webinar comes at a time when healthcare professionals are looking to address the burgeoning opioid epidemic in the United States. 

As a partner on the educational sessions, ONS recognizes the need for oncology nurses to have cutting-edge information about treating chronic pain in patients with cancer. With new CDC guidelines, some fear that opioids will not be available to those who truly need them to manage pain on a daily basis, especially patients with cancer. Because symptom management is a huge component for oncology nurses, it’s important to have a firm understanding of the new CDC guidelines. AACN hopes the webinar will shed some light on how this could affect your patients and how prescribing opioids to patients could change in the future. 

This webinar is the second in a series of four that addresses the nation’s opioid epidemic. Each educational session looks into how healthcare providers can best assess and address the needs of their patients with chronic pain. The remaining webinars—scheduled for October—will cover advanced practice RN curricular integration of opioid education and your practice’s responsibility to enact change during the opioid epidemic. The remaining sessions will be free as well.

If you’re interested the AACN webinars but find yourself unavailable during the broadcast hours, the sessions will be recorded and published to the AACN’s archives for later use. The free, ONS-partnered educational seminars offer tremendous resources to oncology nurses and healthcare providers who are curious about the opioid epidemic and how it affects their practice with patients with cancer. Tune in to enhance your knowledge and elevate your practice.