RX/OTC drug abuse poster presentation at Feb. 2011 OC-SPN Conference held at CHOC

 Congratulations to OC-NAPNAP member Dottie Tagan, PNP who along with her team captured the win for their poster presentation on Teen Drug Abuse.  Pictured LEFT: Dottie Tagan, Karen Caiozzo, and Chris Venable (see credits below for her involvement in the project).

There are four of us that took credit on this project:

• Karen Caiozzo spearheaded the project and began to raise the questions and awareness about the high number of teen admissions to our PICU and the high number of pills prescribed for our patients by the orthopedic, trauma and surgical physicians upon discharge. She developed the plan to begin tracking the prescriptions going home with the patients, brought Project Path into our educational process and coordinated the classes for both the nursing staff and the physicians. Karen developed the abstract, powerpoint presentation and ultimately the poster and it's creative title. Her relentless commitment inspired all of us to get involved in this project.
• Chris Venable is our Charge Nurse in Pediatrics who helped get leadership approval for the project and helped to communicate with and get support from all the nursing staff about the project goals and the data we were collecting. She also acted as a liaison with the physicians and management team to help set up the education for both physicians and nurses.
• Jacqueline Winkelmann, MD, was our pediatric physician consultant and empowered us to educate as many physicians as possible. She has recognized the significance of our message and the education needed on every level and has been the key advisor on the entire project. She has been a huge support to all of us in allowing us to defend our hard work on the project and to have a strong voice among all the physicians we have encountered along the way. She is currently helping us to develop our educational handouts for parents as well as the 24 hour narcotic pill count form for physicians prior to writing discharge prescriptions. 
• My role in all of this began by helping Karen fine tune the abstract and the formatting of the poster presentation. I developed the concept map at the top of the poster to help to simplify the message we were sending to everyone. I also transformed the sample prescription at the center of the poster to highlight the education needed for prescribers. I was also the one who, with your assistance, helped to network and communicate to get our poster visible at the local conferences at NAPNAP LA and OC SPN with the ultimate goal of raising awareness in our community at every level.