10 patients reportedly dead after nurse injected them with tap water instead of fentanyl

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Originally published at: 10 patients reportedly dead after nurse injected them with tap water instead of fentanyl - Boing Boing

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And it’s not just the infection: these people were being given fentanyl because they were in pain. Imagine the misery they must have been in.

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You’re right. The Retrievals is a podcast about fentanyl diversion in a fertility clinic. In that case, the person did replace it with saline, but its heartbreaking to hear stories about women being ignored and pain being brushed aside.

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Tap water is clean enough to drink, but that doesn’t mean that it’s sterile.

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They seem quick to blame the tap water. Hospitals frequently have pseudomonas problems, and it’s naturally antibiotic resistant. The nurse, already not following procedure, could have picked up the contamination locally.

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She was injecting the patients with tap water instead of the prescribed medicine. That’s not “not following procedure.” Not following procedure would be not wiping the injection site with an alcohol wipe first, or contaminating the needle somehow. This isn’t not following procedure. This is an intentional crime. Probably theft, assuming she took the fentanyl to sell. Possibly assault, depending on local assault statutes in that jurisdiction.

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If the goal is the theft of the drug, why bother with the injection at all? The patients would still have been in pain, but they wouldn’t have been made ill or killed.

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This POS was robbing patients of medication for severe pain, and then watching as they suffered. I don’t find it hard to believe that the nurse was sloppy when injecting them with tap water.

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Use of pain medication is usually observed and logged by multiple staff members. It’s tracked pretty scrupulously. What this person did was almost certainly replace the fentanyl in the vials they had in storage with tap water so that would no one would think there was anything missing. This is usually what happens, though saline is the more common substitute. It’s possible that saline is tracked better now for this very reason, which pushed the diverter of the medication to use something more readily available.

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It’s easy to assume the one diverting medication was also administering the medication. It’s possible they never came near the patients. They almost certainly refilled empty vials that were then used as if they had medication in them by unsuspecting hospital staff.

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there’s the whole procedure involved. your coworkers might notice if you didn’t actually take a syringe and do the thing you’re supposed to be doing.

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The fact that people died almost certainly raises it to manslaughter.

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Rick the Anesthetist’s Assistant with the giant cartoon hands full of tapwater at every darn induction is not looking so innocent this week.

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That’s very true. It is dangerous to use tap water in a nepi pot. Imagine putting that stuff in your bloodstream

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Depends a LOT on where in the world you are. Many people, some might even say MOST, don’t have access to clean, drinkable tap water

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