Advanced practice clinicians (APCs)—nurse practitioners and physician assistants—prescribe perioperative opiates at higher doses than the physicians they work with, according to data from a cross-sectional retrospective study.
In the study, APCs wrote 19% of perioperative opioid prescriptions which were, on average, 40 morphine milligram equivalents (MMEs) higher when compared with prescriptions written by surgeons in a perioperative setting (adjusted difference; 95% CI, 31.3-48.7