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A former intensive care unit nurse has been arrested for allegedly swapping sufferers’ ache medicine with faucet water, police in Medford, Oregon, introduced Thursday.
Dani Mari Schofield faces 44 counts of assault within the second diploma, fees that “mirror the overall quantity of sufferers that this investigation revealed to have been affected by Schofield’s prison actions,” the Medford Police Division mentioned in an announcement.
Assault within the second-degree fees are filed when a person “deliberately or knowingly causes critical bodily harm to a different,” the assertion mentioned.
The arrest comes practically seven months after officers at Asante Rogue Regional Medical Middle, a 378-bed hospital in Medford, contacted police with considerations a few rising variety of central line infections amongst sufferers. Central strains are tubes put into giant veins to manage medicine.
“There was concern that Schofield had been diverting sufferers’ liquid fentanyl for her private use after which changing it with faucet water, inflicting critical infections,” Thursday’s police assertion mentioned.
Police didn’t say how lots of the sufferers that Schofield allegedly mistreated had died. In March, a lawsuit was filed on behalf of the property of Horace Wilson, an Asante patient who died after he was admitted to the hospital with a lacerated spleen and damaged ribs following a fall off a ladder in January 2022.
The lawsuit alleged that whereas hospitalized, Wilson’s ache medicine was changed with nonsterile faucet water, introducing micro organism into his bloodstream that led to his loss of life.
The lawsuit named each Asante and Schofield as defendants, accusing them of negligence. Neither responded to requests for remark on the time.
The allegations of drug diversion — a time period that refers to misappropriating prescribed drugs, generally to abuse or illegally promote them — had been first reported by NBC affiliate KOBI-TV in Medford in December 2023. The station mentioned that not less than one affected person at Asante had died after a nurse allegedly diverted their ache medicine.
An legal professional for Schofield, who police mentioned left Asante in July 2023, didn’t instantly reply to a voicemail in search of remark.
Data from the Oregon State Board of Nursing present that Schofield voluntarily agreed in November 2023 to a nursing license suspension, “pending completion of an investigation.”
In an inside memo despatched Thursday to Asante workers after police introduced Schofield’s arrest, President and CEO Tom Gessel thanked regulation enforcement for its “tireless work since our staff introduced considerations ahead to them.”
“We’re significantly appreciative of the numerous hours their investigators have spent on this advanced matter,” he wrote.
This text was initially printed on NBCNews.com
