A former traveling nurse was sentenced on April 4, 2025, in federal court in Boston for tampering with morphine at a Massachusetts nursing home.
The 55-year-old defendant, from Hampton, New Hampshire, received a sentence of three months in prison, followed by two years of supervised release. During this period, she will be prohibited from practicing as a registered nurse or engaging in any work involving access to prescription medications or other controlled substances.
The defendant, who had worked as a registered nurse for over 30 years, was licensed in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts. In 2021, she voluntarily surrendered her New Hampshire nursing license following an investigation by the New Hampshire Board of Nursing. This investigation followed her firing from a nursing home in Derry, New Hampshire, over allegations of morphine tampering.
After surrendering her New Hampshire license, the defendant continued to practice under her Massachusetts license. From December 2021 through at least May 12, 2022, she was employed as a traveling nurse through a healthcare staffing company and was assigned to various nursing homes throughout Massachusetts. Several of these facilities began to suspect that she was diverting morphine from residents because of her consistent access to the bottles of morphine and evidence of tampering (i.e. bottles that were leaking or appearing to be the wrong color). Lab tests confirmed that some bottles had significantly diluted concentrations of morphine.
In the spring of 2022, the defendant was assigned to a nursing home in Danvers, where she had access to morphine as part of her responsibility to treat residents prescribed the drug for pain relief. In April 2022, the nursing home contacted law enforcement after a nurse noticed a bottle of morphine was wet and leaking. Administrators at the facility reviewed morphine bottles on other medicine carts and identified three additional bottles that appeared tampered with, either due to a lighter color or puncture holes in the seal. Laboratory tests confirmed that the bottles were diluted to varying degrees. The defendant had been assigned to the medicine carts containing these bottles approximately two days before they were discovered.
Following these suspected incidents of tampering, law enforcement undertook a “controlled operation” to investigate whether the defendant was tampering with the bottles. On May 12, 2022, before her next shift, law enforcement worked with Danvers nursing home administrators to review and photograph the morphine bottles on the cart assigned to the defendant. The cart contained two bottles of morphine for the same resident, one fully sealed and the other previously opened, from which investigators took a control sample. The defendant was the only person with access to the cart during her shift.
At the end of her shift, law enforcement seized both bottles of morphine before they could be dispensed to the assigned resident. The sealed bottle was found to be a different color, leaking, and showed evidence of multiple puncture holes. Lab tests confirmed that both bottles had been tampered with and diluted.
Compliance Perspective
Issue
Failure to prevent diversion of residents’ prescribed controlled medications by staff who sell or take the drugs for their personal use may be considered abuse, neglect, misappropriation, and fraud, in violation of state and federal regulations. Staff who divert medications have developed a number of ways to conceal diversion. Facilities should implement a proactive diversion-prevention program which identifies the types of medications most likely to be taken, signs that diversion has taken place, and signs of impairment.
Discussion Points
- Review your policies and procedures on preventing, identifying, and responding to drug diversion. Update as needed.
- Train appropriate staff on actions that can be taken to prevent, identify, and respond to any suspicion of drug diversion. Provide education on the impact of drug diversion on residents as a form of abuse and neglect, staff responsibility to report concerns immediately, and the consequences of theft of controlled substances. Med-Net Academy offers three PowerPoint training programs in our Substance Use category; visit MNA to access these resources.
- Periodically audit to ensure that all controlled substances are accounted for on each shift, and that proper documentation of controlled substances has occurred.
*This news alert has been prepared by Med-Net Concepts, Inc. for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide legal advice.*
