Exploring sources of job satisfaction and work-related stressors experienced by organ and tissue donation coordinators in Canada: a qualitative analysis.

Opioid use disorder (OUD) has continued to be a significant public health challenge in the United States since the opioid crisis began in the 1990s. Recent trends have underlined the ongoing severity as fatal overdoses involving opioids have tripled since 2012, with 79,384 deaths in 2024 after peaking in 2022. The increase in mortality is associated with the concurrent rise in synthetic opioid usage, primarily fentanyl, which was involved in 11 percent of fatal opioid-involved overdoses in 2012 and reached almost 92 percent of overdoses in 2023. This has largely been driven by illicit opioid use, with an estimated 828,000 individuals using fentanyl outside of medical recommendations in 2023. Along with increased mortality, OUD is associated with significant morbidity and healthcare costs. From 2002 to 2012, the number of OUD-related hospitalizations had nearly doubled, while total charges for these inpatient stays more than tripled, reaching nearly $14.8 billion. Total charges continue to grow, despite the number of OUD hospitalizations having declined by an estimated 27 percentage points from 2016 to 2019. Additionally, there have been significant increases in OUD admissions that ended in self-directed discharge from 2016 to 2020, which may result in increased rates of readmission and mortality. It is unclear, however, whether these trends have continued, given the lack of national-level studies on OUD-related hospitalizations since the COVID-19 pandemic and changes to policies involving treatment, harm reduction, and opioid prescribing. We used recent data from the National Inpatient Sample to update and expand prior investigations into incidence and outcomes of opioid-related hospitalizations, including trends by sociodemographic and geographic factors.