Nurses take drugs, too

During her employment at Carrington Place of Tappahannock nurse Mollie Murphy took drugs from patient supplies for her own use.

Murphy, in just about two months, took narcotic pain medications such as hydrocodone and oxycodone. Murphy was convicted of two misdemeanor counts of possession of controlled substances in Essex County.

In 2004, Murphy took drugs from Ruxton Health of Williamsburg by “fabricating physician orders to discontinue the medications, documenting destruction of the falsely discontinued drugs, and then retaining the drugs herself.”

The board suspended her license in September. Murphy can apply for reinstatement, but the order does not say for how long she must be suspended first.

Pharmacy tech helps herself to 11,612 pills in three months

Jessica Brashear, a licensed pharmacy technician at a Walgreens in Portsmouth, Va., admitted in a consent order that she diverted medication and lost her job over it. The state revoked her license Sept. 11.

Diverting drugs means taking them for yourself or somebody else. We could fill this blog with stories about drug diversion, because a small but steady number of medical workers help themselves to the drugs they are entrusted to give to patients. Many of them get caught and fired, according to filings you can look up here. Here’s another example in case you’d like more proof that employee drug diversion is a big challenge in health care. And another. And another. And another.

Here’s what Brashear took from Dec. 17, 2006, to March 27, 2007:

-11,342 units of Vicodin

-200 units of Lortab

-60 units of Viagra

-10 units of an antibiotic

Inspectors find bloody cloth at funeral home, yank license

Danville’s Cunningham & Hughes Funeral Home agreed to a six-month license suspension to clean up its act. Put on probation in 2004 for lax compliance with consumer protection laws, record-keeping mandates and established operating procedures in the industry, the business repeatedly failed unannounced inspections in 2005, 2006 and 2007 that it had been told to anticipate.

Inspectors found inaccuracies in its price list, cracked and peeling floor tile and walls, stains in the morgue around the sink and on the floor, dirty embalming instruments and other evidence that contributed to “an appearance of general disorganization,” according to a consent order. “A bloody cloth was found on the floor.”

Other problems included that the funeral home was five weeks late paying a $1,000 fine in 2005 and was late in submitting copies of its waste removal contract and copies of its submissions of death data to the Virginia Department of Health’s division of vital records, raising further questions.

Finally, the state Department of Health Professions confronted manager Cynthia Coleman Hughes with the home’s shaky track record in a written notice in August.. Hughes agreed the allegations were true and went along with the state taking away the home’s funeral establishment license Sept. 6.

Hughes can ask for it back in six months.