Nurse-Peer Mentorship Can Help Prevent Opioid Addiction in Post-Op CRC

Oncology nurses and advanced practice providers (APPs) with more experience managing pain following surgery can help protect patients from opioid addiction by sharing their experience with nurses and APPs newer to oncology or pain management, shared Ronald Bleday, MD, section chief of the Division of Colorectal Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.

Bleday, whose research on long-term opioid use after colon and rectal surgery was recently published in the Journal of Surgical Research, emphasized that nurses and APPs are a patient’s first point of contact for pain management following surgery.¹ Because of this, nurses and APPs are positioned to become familiar with the conditions that usually are associated with more or less pain.

For instance, Bleday mentioned that patients with colorectal cancer whose disease is metastatic will likely have a greater level of pain, which is often treated with larger amounts of narcotics. On the other hand, those with nonmetastatic disease are less likely to require narcotic use and should not be given large doses.

Over time, nurses and APPs gain an understanding of which patients are more likely to need greater levels of pain medication. By sharing this knowledge with their peers who are newer to the field, nurses and APPs can widen the pool of clinicians looking out for a patient’s wellbeing as it relates to the possibility of opioid addiction.

Transcript

Oncology nurses are going to know which type of patients are going to go down a path where they may need more pain medicine, including opioids, than patients who will not. If you have a patient who does not have metastatic disease (who oftentimes have gotten through surgery and are not on opioids post surgery), they are unlikely to need any opioids with neoadjuvant or adjuvant chemotherapy.

However, if you see a patient with metastatic disease, particularly metastatic disease to the bone, you know that the patient is going to have increasing needs for pain control, often with large doses of a narcotic. The experience and knowledge that come with getting to know the pathways that different patients with cancer go down in their treatment is very helpful. For the experienced nurses and APPs, to pass on that instinct and that knowledge to the new “rookies” coming into the care of patients with cancer would be the best thing that they can do for the care of these patients.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Reference

1. McKie KA, Malizia RA, Fields AC, et al. Long-term opioid use after colon and rectal surgery. J Surg Res. 2025;311:86-91. doi:10.1016/j.jss.2025.04.019