Nurses Stealing Drugs

"People are starting to realize that this is a serious and ongoing problem," said Keith Berge of the Mayo Clinic's medication diversion prevention committee. "They're starting to recognize what they've been seeing. I think we've been seeing this all along and not recognizing it for what it is."

The problem? A story out of Minneapolis from Mary 29, 2011 reports that in a six month period in 2010, almost 1500 pills went missing in a health care facility in Sauk Rapids. A certain nurse named Lora was always the one on duty. Lora admitted to stealing the painkillers and other drugs and she was fired and lost her license too.

The bigger problem is that Lora was only one of 13 “licensees” to receive such discipline.

One of the worst stories came in the form of a criminal complaint where a nurse anesthetist in Minneapolis told a patient having kidney stone surgery to “man up” as he went thru the pain – and she pocketed his pain relievers either for herself or for re-sale.

The other “worse story” happened in St. Cloud, where a nurse was inserting a needle into bags of pain killer to withdraw a “taste” for own use.

Other hospital workers have stolen prescription drugs by putting Ibuprofen into the patients’ medicine bottles. Some have siphoned medication from IV bags and taken the leftovers, and others have falsified patient records or forged prescriptions.

In most cases, the people doing the stealing are addicted to the pain relievers, and they are quite daring in procuring them, since they will do anything to get their fix. There was an episode on “House, MD” where House prescribed pain relievers to a patient that didn’t need them so that he could pocket them for himself. As is usually true on that, and many other TV shows, House received less repercussion than a doctor in real life usually would.

The great increase in drug thefts at hospitals has led to the Minnesota Hospital Association and the state Health Department working together to figure out how this is happening and devise ways to make sure that it doesn’t anymore. The key seems to be in having an accurate tracking system. Unfortunately, there are a large number of drugs that get trashed from hospitals, and so even the refuse has to be guarded in some way.

Many hospitals now use automated dispensing machines which require a password and a co-worker to verify when disposals are made. Others have gone back to recording information in bound notebooks with numbered pages, so that it is easy to tell
if any information has been removed. Still others use video cameras.

And the rest of the bad news is this: all of this costs a lot of money, which will be passed along to the patients.