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Up to 10 hospital patients in Oregon died from tap water injections instead of fentanyl: report
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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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.
$83 per person for squirt gun fights right there, if my bill is anything to judge.
Did they use an entire case? That's around 60 flushes.
According to your bill 1 Tylenol is $500
$17 per pill. Seems pretty reasonable.
The fentanyl, however, was worth it.
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.
Yeah I was in the hospital a few weeks ago and had an IV drip in both arms. They were constantly flushing both lines, didn't seem like they tracked or cared how many got used.
I do think tap water is worse. These are people with medical experience, a big part of whose job is making sure they use sterile stuff. They know better. There’s no excuse. This is not just accidental
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 pyxis.
https://lemm.ee/comment/7759006
Covering their tracks most likely.
With a trail of dead patients?
Yeah, gotta hide their theft.
Honestly worked pretty well. Not many are as concerned about the theft as they are about the dead people.
Probably because they aren't filling the containers at work, where they could be caught.
Instead, they steal an empty container, take it home, fill it with water, bring it to work, swap it with a fentanyl container, take it home, use the fentanyl, fill the container with water, bring it to work, etc.
But even still why not use a flush to fill it. They are prefilled and everywhere. I'm a nurse and have worked with nurses caught diverting. This is extra fucked up. Put this guy under the jail.
Saline in american hospitals probably costs $1000 per bucket.
Or even just distilled water. Buy a jug for a couple bucks at the supermarket or distill it yourself for a few pennies worth of electricity. The woman didn't deserve her degree if she thought tap water was safe to inject.
They wanted to get caught out of guilt