A new flier at Daytona Beach-based Florida Hospital Memorial Medical Center informs patients the hospital will only provide short-term opioid treatments and will not refill prescriptions or give long-acting painkillers, according to The Daytona Beach News-Journal.
The new flier opens by saying, "Our emergency department will only provide pain relief options that are safe and appropriate." Hospital administrators say it is an effort to combat opioid abuse in their community
"In the hospital, we see a lot of abuse of narcotics," said Shawn Bishop, the hospital's emergency department director. "For many years, people would come to the emergency department to try and get those. Over the last couple of years we've taken a little bit of a different stance on that, to really limit what we're giving out."