The Colorado Naloxone Project, an effort to ensure all Colorado hospital emergency departments send at-risk patients home with naloxone, launched May 3, The Colorado Sun reported.
Patients only fill prescriptions they receive for naloxone — an opioid-overdose antidote — about 5 percent of the time, according to the newspaper. The Colorado Naloxone Project seeks to give people who are at risk for opioid overdose greater access to the life-saving treatment by sending them home with vials of it when they are discharged from the emergency department.
Forty-seven hospitals have already committed to sending at-risk patients home with naloxone.
The project was started by Don Stader, MD, an emergency physician at Englewood, Colo.-based Swedish Medical Center.
"For people who have never seen the effects of naloxone, it’s amazing," Dr. Stader, told the newspaper. "It's one of the most miraculous things in medicine. You see people who would have truly died come back to life."