Why they didn't use Saline which is safe and hardly controlled instead of... tap water?
Since she was stealing drugs I would imagine that it was due to saline being inventory controlled and would have further raised suspicion.
I work as a hospital supervisor. I honestly don't know of any facility where you can't get saline iv flushes. Most nurses have pockets full of them each shift. If you didn't have that for some reason you could get sterile saline and draw it up yourself, also would be easily obtainable.
My only thought here is that the person didn't want to leave the room when administering drugs and so they used tap water as an easily sourced replacement for the drugs they was stealing since there is a sink is every room (at least in most hospital rooms).
The real answer here is that drug addiction overrides rational thought and they either didn't know or didn't care that tap water is not safe at all for iv administration.
We see lots of cases of diversion unfortunately because these drugs are just so damn addictive and there are only so many safe guards you can put in place to protect against it. At the end of the day no matter how many checks there are you will eventually have a clinical staff member drawing up the drugs and administering it. As long as this remains the case you will have people that abuse that weak link in the chain.
The real answer here is that drug addiction overrides rational thought and they either didn't know or didn't care that tap water is not safe at all for iv administration.
That's the most likely answer.
I buy sterile saline all the time. I think they probably just didn’t give a damn.
Imagine the pain those people went through when they didn’t get their pain meds.
Fuck that nurse.
New horror unlocked; medical care professionals injecting saline instead of pain meds. Complain of pain, anesthesiologist concludes I’m either faking or resistant. So either I wither in pain or they up the dosage. Let’s say the latter happens once or twice and then at shift change the new nurse isn’t a druggie piece of shit and gives the adjusted dosage in full and I overdose, maybe die.
There are other, more sanctioned horrors if you’re ever in the position to need meds to deal with indescribable pain in a hospital.
I once had major abdominal surgery and was on a morphine drip. Unfortunately I have a genetic defect that means I don’t metabolise drugs well, so even strong meds don’t work well and I’ve woken under anaesthetia twice.
It turns out that if you push the button on the morphine machine too many times, its software assumes you’re a drug seeker and starts giving you less. So the more you need it to keep the pain relatively tolerable, the less it will give you.
You don’t even have to have that genetic condition to wind up in a hell of the software’s making. I only learned that was the issue after being at a user experience conference where one of the presenters (pretty sure it was Alan Cooper but it may have been Steve Wozniak) talked about his experience with that machine after an accident that motivated him to research why his pain meds were inadequate, and how medical user experience is horribly abysmal.
As far as I know, nothing has been done to address issues like that since.
That shit happens with surprising regularity. This nurse got caught because they uaed tap water and people died from infections.
But you can just walk into any drug store (probably some grocery stores) and buy enough to swap out the amount of fentanyl they are injecting I would imagine (since it's potent stuff). Just someone that clearly didn't think the plan all the way through, and likely has some debt or driving factor clouding their judgement.
I'm willing to bet you can just buy saline. Or make it at home, as long as it is kept sterile.
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.
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.
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.
Yes. The nursing profession doesn't fuck around with this kind of shit.
She's not rich, so ya, she's fucked.
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.
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.
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
As awful as diversion is, and as awful as the choice to use tap water was…can we talk about why the tap water is full of pathogenic Pseudomonas?
Tap water is full of stuff that is never harmful for people to drink. Injecting it in your veins, though, is a very very bad idea making me wonder how the hell this nurse got her license. You can't be THAT stupid
Seriously, couldn't even be bothered to find some saline so these people in agonizing pain didn't also have to die of terrible blood infections?
I feel for all the other responsible medical workers who are already dealing with the most ornary customers in the world. This nurse, if they were aware, and all complicit staff have fucked their colleagues over.
I agree that tap water def shouldn’t go into your veins. I also recently did a six month long study on Pseudomonas, and pathogenic Pseudomonas specifically, and feel like I know enough about this bacterial family to be freaked out that that’s what was in the water and killed the people.
Just because you can injest something safely doesn't mean it's safe to inject. Your stomach acid and enzymes kill many pathogens in low concentrations so the fact that you can't safely inject tap water doesn't necessarily reflect badly on the water.
Additionally I'm sure the water facet used to get the tap water wasn't sterilized either. You wouldn't want to touch a syringe to your water spigot before using it I'm sure, let alone inject the unsterilized water from it.
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