Colorado Healthcare Workers Charged With Stealing Pain Meds
Marguerite Irene Furgerson has been accused of using the names of at least three patients to forge prescriptions for the narcotic pain reliever, Vicodin. She is the third healthcare worker in Colorado accused of stealing pain killers this year. In another case, a 27 year old surgical nurse, Ashton Paul Daigle, substituted tap water or saline solution for the powerful opiod Fentanyl at Boulder Community Hospital. The third case is the most disturbing and involves a former surgical technician at Rose Medical Center with Hepatitis C.
Kristen Diane Parker worked at the medical center as a surgical technician until a drug test in April revealed she had taken Fentanyl. She told police that she injected the medication, which was meant to treat pain in surgical patients, into herself and then refilled the syringe with saline which would then be reused on patients of the surgical center. And if that alone isn't bad enough, Parker was infected with the Hepatitis C virus, which was passed on to at least 10 patients. She could be facing 34 years to life in prison.
Addiction to prescription pain killers is not a new problem but it does seem to be increasing. It can especially be a problem for doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and any other healthcare worker with easy access to pain medications. Hospice nurses could be especially susceptible with their easy access to powerful drugs in the home environment, where monitoring of medications falls in the hands of family and caregivers rather than the watchful eye of hospital systems.
Comments
The reasons for healthcare workers’ vulnerability to painkiller addiction are complex. As you state, availability of the addictive substance is a key factor. But there are other factors that may be overlooked — healthcare workers are often under enormous stress. Not only are they required to work shifts, often excessively lengthy ones, but they are also exposed the daily trauma of injury, illness and death, and the huge burden of not always being able to make it better, despite social expectations that they will. The result is burnout, which, in the worst cases, leads to the kind of callous disregard for patients that you describe above. Until the healthcare culture starts to treat its workers as human, rather than super-human, the problem of medication theft and addiction will continue.
Hi, Angela.
I’ve started following your blog after learning about it through Palliative Care grand rounds, and have added you to my blogroll.
This is important work. I’m glad to find others like you online.
Thanks