Police: Nurse stole patients’ medication
Say Kane employee took excess pills
A nurse at the Kane Regional Care Center in Scott has been charged with forging medical forms and pocketing patients’ excess narcotics, and the state is moving to permanently suspend or revoke her nursing license.
Tamica Trent, 33, of Monroeville, was charged with multiple counts of acquiring a controlled substance, forgery, tampering with public records, drug possession, and other crimes, according to a criminal complaint filed last month. The State Board of Nursing has ordered that her license, which was issued in 2012, be temporarily suspended.
In documents filed Monday in support of suspending her license, the state Bureau of Professional and Occupational Affairs said Ms. Trent poses “an immediate and clear danger to public health and safety.”
Ms. Trent’s attorney, Ryan Harrison James of White Oak, declined to comment.
A licensed nurse practitioner at Kane, a senior care center, since December 2015, Ms. Trent was responsible for providing patient medication and maintaining a medication cart. She was authorized to contact physicians to change or cancel patients’ medications and to “waste,” or dispose of, excess medications, according to documents in her case.
The proper procedure for “wasting” medications is to have another registered nurse witness the destruction and sign his or her name on a DEA form, according to the criminal complaint. But instead of following the two-person procedure, Ms. Trent forged other nurses’ names on the DEA forms and took the pills for herself.
Not only did she steal
medications she was supposed to have disposed of, but she also “diverted medication she had documented as having given to patients,” the documents say.
Allegheny County detectives began investigating the alleged thefts in February, after Ms. Trent’s supervisor noticed she was disposing of more medications than other nurses and suspected she was stealing them, according tothe criminal complaint.
Ms. Trent’s supervisor then discovered Ms. Trent had signed documents with other nurses’ names and had called doctors over a weekend tochange medication orders.
When detectives interviewed Ms. Trent about her supervisor’s suspicions, she admitted to forging medical documents and not destroying excess medications — including the addictive narcotics Dilaudid, Oxycodone, Norco, and Percocet — of seven patients.
In one incident involving a 96-year-old patient, Ms. Trent falsely documented the disposal of Tramadol pills, forged her supervisor’s signature on the form and took the pills for “personal use,” the complaint said. She also falsely documented doses that were never prescribed to the patient and took those medications for herself, the complaint continued.
Ms. Trent admitted to detectives that she was still in possession of the nearly 50 stolen pills, which they found in a cigarette box in her coat pocket. The detectives also found a few pills and empty opioid patch packages in her car at the hospital, the complaint said.
Ms. Trent is free on nonmonetary bail and faces arraignment Aug. 16.