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Why they didn't use Saline which is safe and hardly controlled instead of... tap water?
Why the fuck would they use tap water when sterile saline flushes are all over the place.
At a guess, are those flushes inventoried and accounted for? Would someone notice if they came up short?
I don't know this hospital, but I generally grab several when I come on shift, put them in my pocket, and end up accidentally taking home a few often enough that I'd end up being able to have squirt gun fights with them.
Essentially, nurses go through so many that you'd be hard pressed to control them. We use them for everything from checking the status of an IV line to cleaning a wound.
Lol no, those saline flushes are found by the handful in supply closets.
And even if they were inventoried (which they're not) there still are always a zillion partially used bags littered everywhere, which in most cases are effectively still sterile.
No, they are so abundant that it'd.be impossible. Now the hanging bags of saline, yes
Presumably because the saline quantities were tracked and documented just like the fentanyl was. Tap water isn't a medical supply. Still completely fucking heinous either way.
No hospital would be able to run by being restrictive with flushes. You just need to use so many of them for IV management and drug administration alone, not to mention all the other stuff we use them for. Essentially every time you put something into an IV line, you need to flush it to get the medication to the patient and you need to periodically flush it to keep it patent. I will document them for Inputs/Outputs with someone who has a heart/kidney problem, but that's as far as it goes. Billing wise, it's subsumed under how they bill for "nursing" as an average, so it's not tracked for that either.
I do think tap water is worse. These are people with medical experience, a big part of whose job is making sure they use sterile stuff. They know better. There’s no excuse. This is not just accidental
Are we questioning the intelligence of a person stealing vital medication from patients and swapping it for something else?
I'm just amazed. It's frankly easier to use a flush than fooling with a sink. You need a flush anyway to administer the medication and I'd imagine most folks diverting IV meds are smuggling them out after transferring them into an empty flush in the first place. It almost makes me wonder if who did it isn't a nurse. Like a pharm tech doing a batch of them at a sink before loading the pixis.
Probably because they aren't filling the containers at work, where they could be caught.
Instead, they steal an empty container, take it home, fill it with water, bring it to work, swap it with a fentanyl container, take it home, use the fentanyl, fill the container with water, bring it to work, etc.
But even still why not use a flush to fill it. They are prefilled and everywhere. I'm a nurse and have worked with nurses caught diverting. This is extra fucked up. Put this guy under the jail.
Saline in american hospitals probably costs $1000 per bucket.
So that nurse will be charged with 10 counts of murder on top of the federal drug crimes, right? ...Right?
actually, probably yeah
probably something like involuntary manslaughter as opposed to literal premeditated murder, but yes serious jail time is warranted
In my state I think "reckless manslaugher" might be apt:
You caused the death of another person; and
You were aware of and showed a conscious disregard of a substantial and unjustifiable risk of death.
It's a nurse. Not a cop.
This really stung in the worst way.
Yes. The nursing profession doesn't fuck around with this kind of shit.
She's not rich, so ya, she's fucked.
Yes, because then they can avoid any liability for the business as well as avoiding blame for the administrators who are guilty of 8 negligent homicides because they ignored the 8 after the second death that meant there was definitely something more than a freak accident going on
Holy fuck.
This is why we need to provide both careful vhetting and a positive work environment for folks like nurses, teachers, etc. These people literally hold our lives in their hands, the future of our kids, etc. It should be a high bar to get in, then we should treat them with the respect/compensation that their role deserves because you get what you pay for.
Nursing supervisor here. Let me tell you a story just in case you might have been able to sleep tonight. I work in a long-term care facility, and most of our staff of nurses is from a staffing agency, which has the same effect as a union. Normally I'm all for unions, except many of these nurses feel incredibly entitled to work how and whenever they want. If I ask them to go fill a vacancy on a different unit that they don't want to work on, they will just cry oppression, and threaten to leave that very minute, which they are able to do because they come from a staffing agency and not our facility. There is literally no scenario where we can just not have nurses, so we are forced to bend around backwards to let them have whatever they want, come on to shift as late as they want, etc, or we have no staff to run a facility and care for patients. At least in my area, shitty nurses are better than no nurses, and many of them choose to weaponize this fact. I'll just reiterate that I am myself a working registered nurse, and these are the facts that I deal with everyday.
Edit: in case it wasn't clear, I'll fight through the gates of hell and back for my nurses, and I frequently end up on a med cart to fill those vacancies I mentioned. The nursing shortage is really bad you guys.
The nursing shortage is really bad you guys.
I know, let’s use temporary nurses that aren’t as qualified: we can pay them less and no benefits. That will increase the number of nurses
"I'll fight through the gates of hell and back for my nurses"*
*Except to advocate that our cheap ass private equity owned facility hire actual full time staff with benefits instead of outsourcing to a temp agency.
Those agency nurses aren't your enemy. They aren't the reason you end up taking an assignment. That's the fault of the corporation that owns you. And in all sincerity, good for those agency nurses demanding the working conditions that they want and refusing to accept whatever the facility wants to push on them.
Sincerely, a hospital nurse having our union election on Jan 10
(And I have stories too, you know. Like my supervisor who tonight simply lied to the overnight sup about our staffing situation and tried to leave two nurses alone to care for NINE patients on our critical care stepdown unit overnight.)
The nursing shortage is at least partially artificial. There is a shortage of nurses who are willing to work in abusive conditions that exploit our legal, moral, and professional obligations to our patients to make their profit. Fight these corporations for safe working conditions and watch how many nurses return to the bedside.
It is alleged that the nurse was attempting to conceal the misuse of the hospital's pain medication supply
What a POS, but at least it was the result of regular ol drug addiction instead of some religious nut job making a "statement" that medications are "unholy and unnatural" or some bullshit.
It unfathomably amazes me that someone intelligent and dedicated enough to get a nursing license was so stupid they didn't know to use something sterilized to replace it with. Drugged up Addict or not.
Oregonian, here. Kinda not surprised this happened in Medford. There are parts of the state that have a serious problem with fentanyl, almost as bad as in the rural south.
Ex-Oregonian here. It's always Medford; before fentanyl, it was meth.
Right? Of course it was Methford.
I really thought you were going to say ‘almost as bad as Yakima’, which would also make sense.
If by "almost" you mean "exactly," sure. The rural South isn't actually any different from the rest of rural America.
Rogue hospital staff reselling fentanyl to fentheads for $$$? Colour me surprised!
This is nothing compared to the literal meth lab in a Riverside hospital. I want to say it was the late 90s
The opiate, fentanyl and meth epidemics are eugenics from the top down with how they're laser targeted to certain locales that have been divested from. The healthcare industry is ripe with corruption by design. More for them, less for you, that includes years on your life.
it's not targeted, it's just that drugs seem like a better idea the more miserable you are to begin with... so divested locales have it worse.
also, the poorer you are the better drug dealing seems.
It is targeted in the sense that conservative areas are less likely to have treatment programs, drug safety testing programs, clean needle programs, or safe use sites.
Are you suggesting that conservatives are actively supporting and advocating for public health and mitigation measures such as you mentioned but are not getting them as part of a targeted campaign?