Up to 10 hospital patients in Oregon died from tap water injections instead of fentanyl: report

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.

I buy sterile saline all the time. I think they probably just didn’t give a damn.

Imagine the pain those people went through when they didn’t get their pain meds.

Fuck that nurse.

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'm willing to bet you can just buy saline. Or make it at home, as long as it is kept sterile.

You can give yourself a brain eating amoeba infection using tap water in a neti pot

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.

Lol no, those saline flushes are found by the handful in supply closets.

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.

With a trail of dead patients?

probably something like involuntary manslaughter as opposed to literal premeditated murder, but yes serious jail time is warranted

I dunno, the one who did the fertility clinic at Yale just got her license back...

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 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.