Police are investigating a series of deaths at an Oregon hospital reportedly caused by infections from tap water injections in lieu of fentanyl.
Inside sources within Asante have since disclosed details surrounding the reported deaths, per NBC5 News. It is alleged that up to 10 patients died of infections contracted at the hospital.
The sources claim the infections were caused by a nurse who purportedly substituted medication with tap water.
It is alleged that the nurse was attempting to conceal the misuse of the hospital's pain medication supply — specifically fentanyl — and intensive care unit patients were injected with tap water, causing infections that resulted in fatalities.
Medford police have confirmed their active investigation into the situation at the hospital but have refrained from providing specific details.
The sources indicate that the unsterile tap water led to pseudomonas, a dangerous infection, especially for individuals in poor health, commonly found in a hospital's ICU.
I work as a hospital supervisor. I honestly don't know of any facility where you can't get saline iv flushes. Most nurses have pockets full of them each shift. If you didn't have that for some reason you could get sterile saline and draw it up yourself, also would be easily obtainable.
My only thought here is that the person didn't want to leave the room when administering drugs and so they used tap water as an easily sourced replacement for the drugs they was stealing since there is a sink is every room (at least in most hospital rooms).
The real answer here is that drug addiction overrides rational thought and they either didn't know or didn't care that tap water is not safe at all for iv administration.
We see lots of cases of diversion unfortunately because these drugs are just so damn addictive and there are only so many safe guards you can put in place to protect against it. At the end of the day no matter how many checks there are you will eventually have a clinical staff member drawing up the drugs and administering it. As long as this remains the case you will have people that abuse that weak link in the chain.
But you can just walk into any drug store (probably some grocery stores) and buy enough to swap out the amount of fentanyl they are injecting I would imagine (since it's potent stuff). Just someone that clearly didn't think the plan all the way through, and likely has some debt or driving factor clouding their judgement.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Yes, because then they can avoid any liability for the business as well as avoiding blame for the administrators who are guilty of 8 negligent homicides because they ignored the 8 after the second death that meant there was definitely something more than a freak accident going on
This is why we need to provide both careful vhetting and a positive work environment for folks like nurses, teachers, etc. These people literally hold our lives in their hands, the future of our kids, etc. It should be a high bar to get in, then we should treat them with the respect/compensation that their role deserves because you get what you pay for.
Nursing supervisor here. Let me tell you a story just in case you might have been able to sleep tonight. I work in a long-term care facility, and most of our staff of nurses is from a staffing agency, which has the same effect as a union. Normally I'm all for unions, except many of these nurses feel incredibly entitled to work how and whenever they want. If I ask them to go fill a vacancy on a different unit that they don't want to work on, they will just cry oppression, and threaten to leave that very minute, which they are able to do because they come from a staffing agency and not our facility. There is literally no scenario where we can just not have nurses, so we are forced to bend around backwards to let them have whatever they want, come on to shift as late as they want, etc, or we have no staff to run a facility and care for patients. At least in my area, shitty nurses are better than no nurses, and many of them choose to weaponize this fact. I'll just reiterate that I am myself a working registered nurse, and these are the facts that I deal with everyday.
Edit: in case it wasn't clear, I'll fight through the gates of hell and back for my nurses, and I frequently end up on a med cart to fill those vacancies I mentioned. The nursing shortage is really bad you guys.
It is alleged that the nurse was attempting to conceal the misuse of the hospital's pain medication supply
What a POS, but at least it was the result of regular ol drug addiction instead of some religious nut job making a "statement" that medications are "unholy and unnatural" or some bullshit.
It unfathomably amazes me that someone intelligent and dedicated enough to get a nursing license was so stupid they didn't know to use something sterilized to replace it with. Drugged up Addict or not.
That's literally what addiction does to people. It makes them unrecognizable. That doesn't excuse it, but it's just the way addiction works. So many comments deriding this person's intelligence when it has zero to do with that.
This is why addiction treatment and social services are so shitty in the US. People are so ready to insult others before trying to understand them, yet the solution to things like this require exactly that understanding. It's like homelessness and NIMBYs. If they're so concerned about the homeless encroaching on their property values, then they should take action to reduce its causes. But instead they'd rather blame, shame, and...expect them to disappear into thin air apparently.
Why? I kinda wondered the same thing at first. It seems the religious nut jobs have no problem ending someones life if they don't agree with what they believe.
Oregonian, here. Kinda not surprised this happened in Medford. There are parts of the state that have a serious problem with fentanyl, almost as bad as in the rural south.
The Retrievals* is a great limited-run podcast about women suffering pain when a nurse was siphoning off fentanyl for personal use and replacing it with saline. Just wanted to shout out a tangential thing.
The sources claim the infections were caused by a nurse who purportedly substituted medication with tap water.
Not even tangential, from this quote it appears to be the exact same situation - a nurse diverting the supply possibly for their own addiction ("attempting to conceal ... misuse" certainly sounds like addiction rather than resale):
The sources claim the infections were caused by a nurse who purportedly substituted medication with tap water.
It is alleged that the nurse was attempting to conceal the misuse of the hospital's pain medication supply — specifically fentanyl — and intensive care unit patients were injected with tap water, causing infections that resulted in fatalities.
Tap water is full of stuff that is never harmful for people to drink. Injecting it in your veins, though, is a very very bad idea making me wonder how the hell this nurse got her license. You can't be THAT stupid
Seriously, couldn't even be bothered to find some saline so these people in agonizing pain didn't also have to die of terrible blood infections?
I feel for all the other responsible medical workers who are already dealing with the most ornary customers in the world. This nurse, if they were aware, and all complicit staff have fucked their colleagues over.
I agree that tap water def shouldn’t go into your veins. I also recently did a six month long study on Pseudomonas, and pathogenic Pseudomonas specifically, and feel like I know enough about this bacterial family to be freaked out that that’s what was in the water and killed the people.
wonder how the hell this nurse got her license. You can't be THAT stupid
Addiction changes people until they don't even recognize themselves. It has nothing to do with smart vs stupid. They were obviously smart and competent enough to be given a license. It's just that the person who did this doesn't even resemble the person who got their nursing license anymore. If they're able to get sober someday, they'll be horrified at having to live with this the rest of their life.
There's a reason addiction is considered a disease. The problem is when people mistake this explanation as an excuse for the things people do while in their addictions. It doesn't excuse it. I just wish more people would make an effort to understand how addiction actually works because if we made any effort as a society instead of constantly playing the bootstrap/blame game, we could deal with it more effectively and prevent shit like this.
Also I don't know anything about what's in tap water, but when addicts use IV drugs that's pretty much what they're mixed with. Obviously there's a lot of infections in that population, but also people who do it every day without tap water killing them.
Just because you can injest something safely doesn't mean it's safe to inject. Your stomach acid and enzymes kill many pathogens in low concentrations so the fact that you can't safely inject tap water doesn't necessarily reflect badly on the water.
Additionally I'm sure the water facet used to get the tap water wasn't sterilized either. You wouldn't want to touch a syringe to your water spigot before using it I'm sure, let alone inject the unsterilized water from it.
We do not for the same reason environments you live in also have Staphylococcus everywhere and it’s impossible to control but assuming you have an average working body and regularly wash your hands before touching things like a toilet handle and then your face you should be pretty safe. Your skin as the largest protective organ and immune system protect you from this. this goes the same for the assumption that you would ingest water as expected and your entire digestive system protects you a lot from what is in water. They do test water but they don’t test it for things you would come into contact when injecting which bypasses a lot of what your body would do already to protect yourself.
This is why some products like netti potties might suggest distilled or boiled water before filling as it’s not a common way to consume water.
The opiate, fentanyl and meth epidemics are eugenics from the top down with how they're laser targeted to certain locales that have been divested from. The healthcare industry is ripe with corruption by design. More for them, less for you, that includes years on your life.
It is targeted in the sense that conservative areas are less likely to have treatment programs, drug safety testing programs, clean needle programs, or safe use sites.