A pharmacy technician had worked for about 18 months at a large health system's outpatient pharmacy in Fontana, where her duties included filling, ordering and receiving medications, typing prescriptions and compounding. The pharmacy filled roughly 1,200 prescriptions a day with a staff of seven pharmacists, nine to ten technicians and eight clerks, kept drugs in open bins on shelves arranged alphabetically, and monitored the floor and lobby with 33 surveillance cameras.
On May 28, 2020 the pharmacist-in-charge notified the Board of Pharmacy in writing of a loss of 117 tramadol tablets, about 3.9 percent of the pharmacy's tramadol acquisitions, and filed a DEA Form 106 reporting the loss as suspected employee theft. The Board opened an investigation of the pharmacy's operations and employees, led by a Board inspector who later testified at the hearing.
The Board's executive officer filed an accusation in January 2021 charging unprofessional conduct and violations of state and federal controlled-substance laws. The technician's registration had been placed under an interim suspension order in December 2020, a temporary measure rather than a finding. At a hearing on March 4, 2021 the technician appeared on her own behalf but presented no evidence of rehabilitation or mitigation.
The administrative law judge found by a preponderance of the evidence that the technician had diverted a total of 117 tramadol 50 mg tablets over several days in May and concluded that public protection required revocation. The Board adopted the proposed decision on April 26, 2021, correcting a date reference from 2021 to 2020, and made the revocation effective May 26, 2021.