Below are articles of drug diversion we found in the news for the week May 24th to May 30th 2015. This list may not be inclusive of all drug diversion events in the news and each individual's story is only listed the first time we see it. If you know of others, please let us know. [...]
A traveling nurse’s drug crimes started in 2013, when she served 90 days in jail according to a recent article and is currently on probation for that. However things didn’t stop there, while on a temporary nursing job and only two days after she was given her swipe badge, she started stealing Fentanyl and Midazolam [...]
When you look at drug diversion, sometimes it can be hard to see everyone that is affected by it. Mayo Clinic even went to the point of calling drug diversion a “multiple-victim crime” in their article Diversion of Drugs Within Health Care Facilities, a Multiple-Victim Crime: Patterns of Diversion, Scope, Consequences, Detection, and Prevention. They [...]
My first thought was good for that patient. There is an article about a LPN in a nursing home that has been charged with stealing medication from the nursing home residents. What is so great about this story is how she got caught. While stealing medication from one resident, she started stealing from another. This [...]
Another day, another drug diversion. Yet this time, the nurse intentionally tried to cover her trail. According to a report, a nurse that worked in a nursing home in New York was stealing prescriptions pain medications, including Percocet. Not only did she know this was wrong to be diverting drugs from the patients' at the [...]
How do you prove wasting of medication really happened? Do you require witnesses? Is it done under camera? What if it is a doctor, do you do things differently? There was recently an article about a doctor that was taking morphine to give herself a boost at the end of her shift. The morphine was given to [...]
Talking with hospitals, two of the key factors to almost all decisions are “Patient Safety” and “Quality of Care”. Unfortunately, when drug diversion comes into play, both of those get thrown out the window. This week a nurse at a rehabilitation center in Connecticut was accused of swapping prescription pain medication, including Oxycodone and Diazepam, [...]
While I hear cases all the time about drug diversion from hospitals by employees entrusted to safely dispense and administer controlled substances, I have never been as heartbroken as what I just heard. A man in upstate New York pleaded guilty last week to counts of kidnapping and sexually exploiting four children, on 16 occasions. [...]
There is a story out of Fresno, CA of a nurse that was stealing Fentanyl. He is accused of stealing over 400 vials of it while he was to be on paternity leave. What is interesting is that he was coming into the hospital taking just a few vials each time to make it appear [...]
The “Wall of Shame” numbers do not really tell the entire story on the size of the breach issue in healthcare? When we ask healthcare organizations about their data breach risk we consistently get two answers: The first thing we hear is a version of this statement: “There really are not a lot of breaches [...]