Kelly L Matson, Peter N Johnson, Evan R Horton
5 min
This position statement from the Pediatric Pharmacy Association (PPA) addresses the critical need for specialized guidance on opioid use in children and adolescents. Historically, pediatric pain management has often relied on adapted adult protocols, which may not account for the unique developmental risks of the pediatric population. The PPA outlines a comprehensive framework for pharmacists to improve safety, prevent misuse, and manage pain effectively in young patients.
The PPA emphasizes that pharmacists are essential in shifting pediatric pain management toward a multimodal approach. This strategy prioritizes non-opioid therapies—such as acetaminophen, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), and nonpharmacologic techniques—as the first line of defense for mild-to-moderate pain. When opioids are necessary, pharmacists should advocate for the lowest effective dose and shortest duration, while avoiding long-acting formulations and medications like codeine or tramadol in children under 12.
Beyond prescribing, the PPA highlights the pharmacist's role in preventing opioid diversion and misuse. Key recommendations include:
For adolescents diagnosed with opioid use disorder, the PPA stresses that evidence-based pharmacotherapy—including methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone—is currently underutilized. Pharmacists are encouraged to assist in screening, provide brief interventions, and facilitate referrals to specialized treatment centers to ensure young patients receive appropriate care.
Limited guidance on opioid use exists in the pediatric population, causing medication safety concerns for pain management in children and adolescents. Opioid misuse and opioid use disorder continue to greatly affect adolescents and young adults in the United States, furthering the apprehension of their use. The Pediatric Pharmacy Association (PPA) recommends that pharmacists contribute their knowledge to pain management in children, including discussing the appropriate use of non-opioid alternatives for pain and when to recommend co-prescribing naloxone. The PPA also supports the review of electronic prescription drug monitoring programs before opioid prescribing and dispensing by both prescribers and pharmacists, respectively. Education by pharmacists of children and their families regarding proper administration, storage, and disposal, as well as the awareness of opioid misuse and use disorder among adolescents and young adults, is key to prevention. If opioid use disorder is diagnosed, PPA encourages improved access among adolescents to evidence-based medications, including methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone. Furthermore, pharmacists should assist with, or in some settings perform, screening and referral to evidence-based treatments.
Sam: Is naloxone co-prescribing actually standard practice in pediatric settings yet?
Alex: Not universally. The paper acknowledges it's becoming standard for clearly high-risk cases, but argues the threshold for co-prescribing should be much lower—essentially, if you're writing an opioid prescription for a child or adolescent, naloxone should accompany it as a default rather than an exception.
Sam: And then there's the home environment piece, which is a confound that clinical protocols often don't reach.
Alex: Exactly—and it's the layer that's easiest to overlook. A well-managed prescription can still result in harm if unused pills sit in an unlocked cabinet. The paper assigns pharmacists explicit responsibility for counseling families on safe storage and disposal. On disposal specifically, the recommendation isn't simply "throw it away"—it's mixing the medication with something unpalatable, like coffee grounds or kitty litter, before disposal, to prevent accidental ingestion or opportunistic diversion.
Sam: So the full framework is: optimize the analgesic approach before reaching for an opioid, monitor dispensing history across providers, co-prescribe naloxone, and close the loop on the home environment.
Alex: That's the architecture. And the paper's argument is that pharmacists are structurally positioned to enforce all four of those layers—they're the last professional touchpoint before the medication reaches the patient.
Sam: Here's the obvious question for anyone reading this as a researcher: what's the empirical basis? Is there a causal estimate of how much this intervention package actually moves the needle on pediatric OUD incidence?
Alex: That's the honest limitation, and the paper doesn't obscure it. This is a position statement—it synthesizes existing guidelines and clinical consensus rather than presenting new primary data. There's no direct causal estimate of how much these specific pharmacist-led interventions reduce long-term OUD rates in pediatric cohorts. That evidence gap is real.
Sam: So it's a practice framework grounded in mechanistic reasoning and existing guideline literature, but the effect size question is genuinely open.
Alex: Correct. The downstream research agenda is clear though: what's needed are prospective studies with pediatric cohorts, tracking OUD incidence as a function of stewardship protocol adherence. That's a tractable question, and the position statement is essentially making the case for why it's worth running that study at scale.
Sam: And in the meantime, the framework gives clinicians and pharmacists something to implement while that evidence accumulates.
Alex: That's the framing. It's a call to action—integrating stewardship into standard pharmacy workflow now, while building the evidence base to quantify the impact. One near-term implementation target the paper gestures toward is EHR integration: systems that automatically trigger a stewardship alert when a prescription exceeds a defined day-supply threshold, making pharmacist review a structural requirement rather than a discretionary step.
Sam: That's the kind of nudge architecture that could actually change population-level behavior without depending on individual clinician vigilance.
Alex: Precisely. And that's ultimately what the paper is arguing for—a system where the pharmacist's stewardship role is embedded in the workflow, not bolted on as an afterthought. Thanks for listening to ResearchPod.