Christchurch Hospital's emergency department has seen a spike in patients overdosing on common pain killers, leading to calls to restrict the sale of painkillers including paracetamol and ibuprofen.
During the five-week Covid-19 lockdown, there was a 13 per cent jump in overdoses of paracetamol and ibuprofen, which there are no restrictions on.
“The types of presentations changed so we had a dramatic increase in the people attending with overdoses and self-harm,” Christchurch Hospital emergency specialist and Otago University researcher Dr Laura Joyce said.
“Of those overdoses there was a particular increase in people who were overdosing on over the counter drugs paracetamol and ibuprofen. At the moment you can go to any of the cheap pharmacies and buy 100 tablets in one go.”
Alannah Lee Spankie died after overdosing on paracetamol in 2017, with the Coroner ruling this year that she did not intend to take her own life.
He wants paracetamol sales limited to one packet at a time, and so does the College of GPs.
“There are two things that are basically being discussed. One is to restrict the amount of paracetamol you could buy over the counter to, say, 20 tablets or secondly it becomes a pharmacy-only medication as happens in a lot of Europe,” Bryan Betty of the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners said.
A law change in the UK limiting the size of paracetamol packets saw a 43 per cent drop in related deaths. Liver transplants were also reduced by 61 per cent.
“They will take a number of tablets and eight or 24 hours down the track their liver will start failing. The only treatment we have for that is liver transplant,” Dr Joyce said.
“We know in New Zealand we don’t have a lot of donors and so it can be a really nasty death.”
Medsafe is aware of the issues and is continuing to consult with the sector about the use of more than 50 million paracetamol tablets each year, but for now there are no plans to reclassify our most widely used drug.
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