Nurses Stealing Pain Medication

In hospitals and nursing homes across the country

, there are reports and accusations of nurses pilfering pain medications. Prescription drug abuse has been on the rise in the last 10 years and is becoming a major issue in the healthcare industry. But no longer does the suspicion remain with the patient, now we have to worry about the very people entrusted with caring for them.

Morton General Hospital in Washington state has recently lost nurse Tina Long to alleged drug thefts. Federal prosecutors say that Long stole Dilaudid and morphine that was intended for patients in a patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) system. Long is accused of stealing the majority of each drug and diluting them with saline solution to conceal her actions. She was able to get away with it for about 5 months before being caught.

The PCA system enables patients to simply push a button for pain medication to be administered through an IV tube on an as-needed basis. Long was noticed kneeling in front of a drug cabinet in a room requiring passwords and fingerprint to enter. The coworker saw that Long was inside the PCA drawer an became suspicious because there were no patients on PCA drugs at Morton General Hospital at that time. Apparently, Long had been giving diluted pain medication to patients and keeping the rest for either her own use, or to sell.

A nurse in Minnesota has also been siphoning pain medication from IV bags and replacing it with saline solution. Blake Zenner pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of obtaining a controlled substance by fraud. He admitted to taking Dilaudid from IV bags at a St. Cloud hospital for a term of about 5 months, and filling the bags with saline solution. As a result of this, about 25 patients were infected with bacteria. Thankfully, they have successfully been treated with antibiotics.

Another nurse in Minnesota has allegedly stolen a plethora of painkillers from a nursing home in Duluth, Ecumen Lakeshore. She took a total of 764 pills that were meant to be given 34 different residents over a length of again, about 5 months. A resident eventually reported she was in extreme pain after not receiving her oxycodone. The nurse in question resigned after being questioned by officials at the facility for signing out oxycodone three separate times over the course of one shift and never once handing over the drug to a resident. Supposedly, these stolen painkillers were only meant to be given to patients with varying needs and were not for regularly scheduled patients.

Although these problems are happening in states all over the country, Minnesota has found that between 2005 and 2011, there have been 250 cases of stolen or missing prescription drugs from nursing homes, hospitals and other heal care facilities in Minnesota. What the stolen drugs are being used for is not as important as who is stealing them. Nurses are instructed by the Health Department on keeping track of and administering controlled substances. Now they are the ones stealing them? Luckily, 5 months seems to be the limit before the thefts are noticed. Hopefully these cases will encourage hospitals and nursing homes to keep a tighter watch not only on their medication, but on the staff administering it.

by: Joyce Herzog

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