Investigators for the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office alleged that a registered nurse in a central Pennsylvania hospital emergency department withdrew vials of morphine sulfate under patient names and kept the drug instead of administering it. The complaint describes three occasions in June and July. On two of them, investigators wrote, syringes of saline were used to make it appear to a witnessing colleague that excess morphine was being wasted, while the leftover drug was concealed in a vial in a pocket.
The investigation began on July 7 when another nurse found a syringe in an employee restroom that requires an identification scan for entry and reported it immediately to security and a supervisor. Access records reportedly showed who had last entered the restroom, and medication records showed a morphine withdrawal from the fingerprint-controlled automated dispensing cabinet about six minutes earlier.
A second red flag was documentation practice. Rather than scanning the medication barcode and the patient wristband at the bedside, the administration time was entered manually. An investigator wrote that a manual entry can be backdated at any point in a patient's chart and is an indicator of diversion.
After the hospital learned of the concerns, the nurse was pulled from duty and sent for a fitness for duty examination, and a urine drug screen returned positive results for morphine, amphetamine and marijuana, according to the complaint. State licensing records showed an indefinite suspension of the nursing license in September 2022, and the hospital confirmed the individual no longer worked there.