A former nursing home employee has been sentenced to prison for taking painkillers from hospice patients for her own use. Katie Louise Boll, 31, of Manchester, was sentenced to four years on a plea of tampering with a consumer product resulting in injury and acquiring oxycodone by deception. She will be on supervised release for three years following her prison time. Boll, a registered nurse, had worked at the Good Neighbor Home in Manchester starting in September 2018. Authorities allege that at least 50 times, Boll checked out hydrocodone for two patients’ pain relief and swapped it out for Tylenol that she gave the patients, keeping the hydrocodone for herself. On Dec. 24, 2018, she allegedly took a part of hospice patients’ morphine solution for herself and diluted the remainder with mouthwash, putting the patient, who was suffering from a terminal illness, at risk of increased pain, court records state.
Boll is also accused of opening medication cartridges to obtain narcotic pain pills including oxycodone, morphine, tramadol and codeine on Dec. 29, 2018. She then replaced the medications with other Tylenol, Lasix and other substances. The swap lead to $593 in false billing for Medicare, Medicaid and the patients. Before working at Good Neighbors, Boll had been employed at Regional Medical Center in Manchester and UnityPoint-St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids. She allegedly stole pain medication from hospice patients at those establishments, sometimes keeping signed-out medications for herself and other times taking leftover medication instead of discarding it in a procedure known as wasting, records state. She had been terminated from the hospitals for inaccurate narcotic documentation and failing to follow pain medication protocols, according to court records.
