About

Derrick Glymph is an Associate Clinical Professor in the School of Nursing at Duke University. His research focuses on pain management, particularly in veterans and populations with chronic pain, as well as issues related to health disparities, palliative care, and the role of nursing in addressing the opioid epidemic. His work includes evaluating structured postoperative ketamine infusion programs for veterans, managing noncancer pain, and exploring the holistic needs of patients in palliative settings. Glymph's contributions extend to addressing systemic barriers faced by Black men in nursing, promoting diversity and equity in healthcare leadership, and advocating for policy changes to improve access to mental health and substance use treatment. His research also encompasses the intersection of heat and substance use in rural communities, pain management in women with polysubstance use, and mobilizing nurses to combat the addiction crisis. Through his scholarly work, Glymph aims to advance nursing practices and health outcomes, emphasizing the importance of interprofessional collaboration and workforce development in healthcare.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Nursing
• Medical education
• Orthodontics
• Anesthesia
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Integrating Psychedelics Into Nursing Education and Practice: Historical, Clinical, and Educational Perspectives

  The Journal for Nurse Practitioners · 2026-05-14

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Pain Management and Health Disparities

  Nursing Clinics of North America · 2025-05-09

  review1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Quality of Recovery in Veterans Following Postoperative Ketamine Infusion Implementation

  Pain Management Nursing · 2025-11-20

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Intersecting Risk: Heat and Substance Use in Rural Communities

  Substance Use & Misuse · 2025-03-09 · 1 citations

  article

  BACKGROUND: Extreme heat has a direct impact on health and can exacerbate substance use. Rural communities are at high risk given higher rates of hospitalizations for heat related illness and the disproportionate effects of substance use. This commentary explores the connection between heat and substance in rural communities and proposes recommendations within the span of policy, research and practice that can be tailored to fit the local rural context. CONCLUSIONS/IMPORTANCE: If implemented, comprehensive approaches such as Promoting of Local Infrastructure and Safe Spaces, Addressing Structural Health Inequities, Developing Workforce, Developing and Evaluate Public Health Communication Strategies, Engaging the Community in Developing Research, Education and Awareness, and Harm Reduction can lead to systemic changes that will greatly improve the health outcomes of rural communities.

  PublisherDOI

• State of Black men in nursing: An oral history of the challenges and the benefits of five Black male nurse leaders

  Nursing Outlook · 2024 · 6 citations

  • Sociology
  • Nursing
  • Medicine
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ketamine Use for Palliative Care in the Austere Environment: Is Ketamine the Path Forward for Palliative Care

  American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine® · 2024-04-17 · 1 citations

  reviewSenior author

  The goal of palliative care is to focus on the holistic needs of the patient and their family versus the pathology of the patient's diagnosis to reduce the stress of illness. U.S. servicemembers deployed to austere environments worldwide have significantly less access to palliative care than in military treatment facilities in the U.S. Preparation for future conflicts introduces the concept of prolonged medical management for an environment where urgent casualty evacuation is impossible. Ketamine is currently widely used for analgesia and anesthesia in the care of military service members and its use has increased in combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan due to the favorable preservation of respiratory function, minimal changes in hemodynamics, and lower pain scores compared to opioids. Ketamine acts as a non-competitive antagonist on N-methyl-D aspartate (NMDA) receptors. Its anesthesia and analgesic effects are complex and include both presynaptic and postsynaptic neurons in brain and spinal cord. The use of palliative care to minimize suffering should not be withheld due to the logistical boundaries of austere military environments or lack of guidelines for recommended use. The use of ketamine for palliative care is a new clinical management strategy to provide both sedation and pain management for an acute pain crisis or comfort measures for the terminally ill. This makes ketamine an attractive consideration for palliative care when managing critically wounded patients for an extended time.

  PublisherDOI

• “ROLE” Out of the Network of Black Male Nursing Leaders Mentorship Program

  Nursing Outlook · 2024 · 5 citations

  • Nursing
  • Psychology
  • Medicine
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Nursing Process Approach to Pain Management for Women with Polysubstance Use

  Nursing Clinics of North America · 2024-09-13 · 1 citations

  review1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Policy priorities to improve access to advanced practice nursing care for mental health and substance use problems: An American Academy of Nursing manuscript

  Nursing Outlook · 2024-12-12 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  Nearly 50% of the U.S. population struggles with a mental health or substance use disorder in their lifetime, yet a substantial number are unable to receive treatment or are undertreated due to significant shortages and disparities in the mental health workforce. These shortages and disparities contribute to health inequities that leave already-vulnerable populations at increased risk for detrimental consequences. Access to mental health and substance use treatment could be improved by better utilizing the Advanced Practice nursing workforce providing care in mental health and substance use treatment, and by better defining Advanced Practice nursing roles, including those with specialty certifications in mental health and substance-related care. This paper makes policy recommendations to better define, grow, and more fully utilize the Advanced Practice nursing workforce providing mental health and substance-related services.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Leveraging the nursing workforce to advance the national response to the addiction crisis in the United States

  Journal of Clinical Nursing · 2023-07-26 · 1 citations

  editorialOpen access

  On 29 December 2022, President Biden took a crucial step toward improving addiction services by signing the bipartisan Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment (MAT) Act. This Act expanded access to the life-saving medication buprenorphine, which is used to treat opioid use disorder, by eliminating the X waiver, legislation that restricted prescribing. This important measure was one component of the 2022 National Drug Control Strategy aimed at mitigating untreated addiction, which was identified as a 'critical driver of the opioid epidemic' (Office of National Drug Control Policy [ONDCP], 2022). In the United States, approximately 37 million people diagnosed with substance use disorders (SUDs) have not received care (Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration [SAMHSA], 2021). The 2020 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), a national dataset that provides information on substance use and substance use disorder treatment and that is used to inform policy and service delivery, reports that about 15% of Americans aged 12 or older (41.1 million people) need addiction treatment. However, only 1.4% of Americans (4.0 million people) have received any treatment for substance use (SAMHSA, 2021). This unmet need in the treatment of SUDs is known as the 'treatment gap', which must be addressed since the cost of maintaining the status quo is tremendous (ONDCP, 2022). Untreated SUDs have a significant impact on the health of Americans, resulting in excess morbidity and premature mortality. Drug overdoses have claimed more than one million lives since 1999 and currently take a life every 5 min (ONDCP, 2022). In this sense, the treatment gap has a staggering impact on human life, and it also costs the country economically. In 2020, the opioid epidemic alone cost 1.5 trillion US dollars, a figure that does not include the impacts of tobacco, alcohol or other drugs (Heinrich, 2022). While the removal of the X waiver represents a first step to increasing access to medication, the healthcare workforce must be mobilized to provide SUD treatment interventions. Notably, the Biden–Harris Administration has recognized the need to increase the nation's SUD treatment workforce; however, to mitigate an epidemic that has been growing for the past 25 years, it is also necessary to optimize and align the healthcare workforce. In the US today, the addiction healthcare workforce is disjointed and specialized. The workforce consists of addiction specialists, including physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, social workers and counsellors from the public and private sectors, amounting to approximately 248,000 individuals in total (Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Center of Employment and Wages (BLS, QCEW, 2022). This workforce is inadequate in size and unable to meet the needs of the 37 million individuals eligible for SUD treatment (SAMHSA, 2021). In order to curb the addiction epidemic, a reimagined, generalized, sustainable healthcare workforce prepared to manage the care of individuals with SUD is sorely needed. This reimagined workforce should leverage the 4.2 million nurses currently working in the United States, who represent the largest untapped resource for providing care to individuals experiencing SUDs (BLS, QCEW, 2022). Nurses can advance the national response to the addiction crisis through three key dimensions: expertise, reach and efficacy (Table 1). Nurse-led addiction initiatives with low barriers to access, e.g. mobile medication vans Nurses have expertise across fundamental areas of patient-centred, whole-person health. An integrated neurobiological, socio-contextual approach is needed to provide interventions for individuals experiencing symptoms of addiction. Nurses are equipped to provide the full range of evidence-based treatments and, beyond that, they are educated to provide interventions based on pathophysiological presentations while also considering the context of the individual's life. These services can be medication-focussed, counselling-based or a combination of both. As the largest group in the healthcare workforce, nurses have reach. They have locational flexibility across the healthcare continuum, and nurses can work in a range of settings and geographical locations. All nurses can be trained to assess for and deliver interventions in whatever specialty and setting they work. In addition to their core competencies, nurses can be trained to deliver assessment and intervention strategies tailored to the specialty. For example, nurses working in the emergency department, wound care and cardiology can initiate crisis interventions such as medications and treatment linkages; nurses working in surgery can implement multimodal pain management strategies that include non-opioid interventions to enhance pain relief; nurses in neonatal settings can work with families who are experiencing neonatal abstinence syndrome to allocate resources. Nurses are not always used to their full scope in addiction treatment. Despite this, nurses in the addiction specialty have led successful initiatives. Two nurse-led programmes in Massachusetts and New York have improved addiction outcomes (Fiore-Lopez & Shea-Lewis, 2020; LaBelle et al., 2016). The Massachusetts Model of Office-Based Opioid Treatment was put forward as a collaborative model of care coordinated by the nurse care manager (NCM). The NCM conducts an initial assessment for medication, which is confirmed by a physician through chart review, and supports the buprenorphine induction process with weekly ongoing visits until the patient stabilizes. This programme uses the nurse to their full scope of practice and thereby expands treatment for individuals with opioid use disorder (LaBelle et al., 2016). Meanwhile, at St. Charles Hospital in New York, nurse-led interdisciplinary teams on an innovative withdrawal and stabilization unit deliver education and coaching to individuals with SUDs, which have improved recovery outcomes, prompting an increase in the number of beds for the programme (Fiore-Lopez & Shea-Lewis, 2020). As the addiction epidemic outpaces the capacity of the substance treatment workforce, we must leverage nurses across all specialties and settings to close the treatment gap. If the addiction epidemic is left unaddressed, it will continue to place significant strain on individuals, families, communities and society. Nurses have the necessary expertise, reach and efficacy to provide interventions for SUDs. However, the nursing workforce is underused in the treatment of SUDs. Failing to mobilize nurses to provide this care represents a missed opportunity to advance addiction treatment. M.A is a member of the Early Career Researcher JCN Editorial Advisory Board. V.G.R. reports grants and personal fees from ViiV Healthcare and personal fees from Gilead Sciences, all outside the submitted work; serves as a member of the US Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, the CDC/HRSA Advisory Committee on HIV, Viral Hepatitis, and STD Prevention and Treatment, and the HHS Panel on Antiretroviral Guidelines for Adults and Adolescents; and serves on the board of directors of the HIV Medicine Association and of the Latino Commission on AIDS.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Matthew Tierney

  American Academy of Nursing

  6 shared

• JoEllen Schimmels

  4 shared

• Mercy Ngosa Mumba

  Tuscaloosa VA Medical Center

  4 shared

• Cynthia Taylor Handrup

  University of Illinois Chicago

  4 shared

• Kathleen R. Delaney

  2 shared

• Bimbola Akintade

  East Carolina University

  2 shared

• Linda L Wunder

  University of Miami

  2 shared

• Rishelle Y Zhou

  VA Portland Health Care System

  2 shared

Labs

• Ruby L. Wilson Center for Nursing Science & InnovationPI

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists (FA…
• Fellow of the American Nurses Association (FAAN)
• Fellow of the International Anesthesia and Critical Care Nur…