Poland’s Health Ministry has introduced a monitoring system for opioid prescriptions amid concerns over a growing number of cases relating to the use of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 20 to 40 times more potent than heroin linked to almost 75,000 deaths in the United States last year.
Since the beginning of this year, Poland’s state sanitary inspectorate has recorded almost 50 cases of fentanyl poisoning and at least four recent deaths have been linked to the drug, reports the Gazeta Wyborcza daily.
On June 17, health minister Izabela Leszczyna told broadcaster Polsat that she had instructed her ministry’s e-health centre to “continuously monitor the issuing and fulfilling of opioid prescriptions”.
Fentanyl can be legitimately prescribed as a form of pain relief, for example for cancer patients or those recovering from surgery. However, there are concerns that some doctors are issuing prescriptions for illicit use of the drug.
Marek Tomkow, president of the Supreme Pharmaceutical Council (NIA), told Polsat that existing measures to prevent such prescriptions were clearly not working. He noted that, once a prescription was issued by a doctor, there was little that pharmacists or police could do.
The Health Ministry’s new monitoring system is intended to detect anomalies in the number of opioid prescriptions being issued. The information will then be passed on to the Chief Pharmaceutical Inspectorate (GIF) and, if deemed necessary, law enforcement authorities will be informed.
Leszczyna emphasised that “this monitoring will be carried out at the level of doctors and medical entities” and that “patient data will absolutely not be transferred anywhere” and would remain confidential and secure.
Tomkow noted that the issue was part of a wider problem with abuses of the prescription system – in particular through prescriptions obtained via online consultations – in order to obtain drugs that could be abused.
Last year, Poland’s former government introduced limits on the number of prescriptions that individual doctors could issue in an attempt to prevent such practices.
The United States has in recent years been blighted by the abuse of fentanyl. The drug was responsible for over 74,000 deaths in the country in 2023, according to the US National Center for Health Statistics.
In February, three people in the town of Zuromin in Poland died due to fentanyl overdoses. Last week, a death that occurred in the city of Poznan at the end of last year was confirmed as being Poland’s first know fentanyl fatality. (Notes from Poland)