News Amid opioid crisis, drug-abusing nurses get secret sanctions

[RUC4]

Amid Opioid Crisis, Drug-Abusing Nurses Get Secret Sanctions

By Johnny Edwards
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
1 June 2018

Excerpts:

Yet another nurse went to work at a hospital so intoxicated she couldn’t operate a computer or an elevator, then she gave a patient the wrong medication.

Without a doctor’s OK, another nurse ordered Demerol and Benadryl for an emergency room patient, but that patient had already been discharged. Later, he found work in the hospital at Georgia State Prison, where he pilfered those same drugs and worked while he was impaired.

Georgia nurses ensnared in the opioid epidemic, even those who showed up at work stumbling, tampered with syringes to get a fix, or falsified patient records to cover up their addiction.

But the public can't know who all the addicted nurses are, what they did, or the extent of what some call a crisis, because of the way the state's regulatory board for nurses is operating, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found.

 

[Lil'LinaptkSix]

I knew a nurse that worked in a home for the elderly that used to somehow get bags of pills that he would trade for fent patches.
He would have Dilaudid, percs, hydros, oxymorh etc.
He brought a bag full of gold jewelry and I had to cut it short as I knew he was stealing it from the patients.
AFAIK he is still employed and this was several years back.