Doctor stole drugs from clinic and used fake prescriptions
A RESPECTED gynaecologist stole powerful drugs from the clinic where he worked, and forged more than two dozen prescriptions in patients’ and colleagues’ names, a court has heard.
The prescription scam was rumbled when a supermarket pharmacist became suspicious of Harsit Tejura’s repeated visits to the store to collect Viagra and other medications in person.
Those suspicions led to an investigation – and to police finding dozens of vials of the Class-A drug fentanyl in the doctor’s filing cabinet at work.
Cardiff Crown Court heard that at the time of the offending Tejura was a consultant gynaecologist at the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport, and one of the directors of the private Centre for Reproduction and Gynaecology Wales clinic.
Rosamund Rutter, prosecuting, said between February 2017 and June 2019 the defendant made repeated visits to the pharmacy in the Talbot Green branch of Tesco to collect prescriptions.
She said staff became concerned about the doctor turning up to collect medication in person, and about incomplete patient information on the forms.
Matters came to a head in May last year when staff challenged the 51-year-old about the names and addresses on the prescriptions. Tejura said he did not remember the full addresses of all his patients, and said he was collecting the medication so patients could pick it up from him on their next visit.
When he returned the following month with another prescription staff raised their concerns with senior pharmacists, and the police were alerted.
The court heard that in his subsequent interview Tejura admitted writing 18 false prescriptions in the names of patients or colleagues without their knowledge, and using them to obtain medication from the Talbot Green Tesco. He also admitted to doing the same thing with another dozen prescriptions at a branch of Asda, offending which to that point had not been detected.
The doctor said he was suffering from erectile dysfunction as a result of medication he was taking, and needed the Viagra to treat it as he was having extra-marital sex. A number of Viagra tablets were found in his wallet.
A search of his office at the Centre for Reproduction and Gynaecology
Wales in Llantrisant found dozens of vials of fentanyl, a powerful Class-A opioid painkiller, which the medic had taken from the clinic’s stocks. He said the drug was for personal use.
Tejura, of Ruperra Close, Old St Mellons, Cardiff, had previously pleaded guilty to two counts of theft by an employee and to fraud by false representation when he appeared in the dock for sentencing.
He has no previous convictions. Nick Gedge, for Tejura, said the defendant’s family had fled Uganda under the regime of Idi Amin, and had settled in the UK, with Tejura going on to study medicine and make a “positive contribution to society” through his work.
He said the background to the offending had been the “huge personal and professional stresses” in the defendant’s life, and “serious depression” for which he had not sought help due to “the stigma of that kind of diagnosis”.
The barrister said it was indicative of the defendant’s state of mind at the time that Viagra was available to buy over the counter, and Tejura could have done that instead of creating the false prescriptions – prescriptions he paid for in any event. He added: “To use the vernacular – he simply was not thinking straight.”
Judge Richard Williams told Tejura he had abused the privilege and trust placed in doctors to prescribe medicines, and also circumvented the clinic’s auditing system to acquire the fentanyl “off the books, so to speak” – but he said he was satisfied there was no financial motive for taking the Class-A drug.
He said the offending was so serious it crossed the custody threshold but he had to consider whether a custodial sentence – either served immediately or suspended – was inevitable in the case, and having listened to the background to the case and the mitigating factors he had changed his mind, and decided it was not.
Giving the defendant credit for his guilty pleas, he sentenced him to a 12-month community order with a rehabilitation requirement, and fined him £1,000.