Special Report: License for Addiction

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) - Nurses are supposed to help you if you're in a doctor's office, hospital or nursing home. But some of them are helping themselves to powerful narcotics meant for patients.

In numbers that might surprise you, many of the offending health care workers are stealing dangerous and deadly drugs for personal use or sell to others. In fact, more than 80 percent of the nurses who face sanctions from the state board are facing them because of substance use or abuse.

Registered nurse John Hyde knows the Jekyll and Hyde stranglehold of addiction. After taking pain medication patches of Fentanyl from one Monroe County nursing home and losing his job, police say he later admitted stealing the same painkiller patches off the backs of patients at another nursing home. He told police he targeted the patients because they were vulnerable.

"I think the indication was that he chose those who might not be able to provide much information as to what had transpired," said Captain Joe Qualters of the Bloomington Police Department.

Hyde is awaiting trial for felony theft and drug possession.

Registered nurse Vicki Hull said she was diverting a drug used for anesthesia.

"I was probably playing a very dangerous game at that point," she admits.

Hull's drug of choice to self-treat her depression is called Diprivan . Hull said she'd take whatever was left from a patient’s dosage, or take entire vials to shoot up. She was stealing the drugs for her own use.

Police say another woman was stealing drugs from a patient for profit.

Holly Ann Ramey was caught on police surveillance video selling tablets of morphine to an undercover cop in Franklin. She was a certified nurse’s aide, working in home health care. In the video, she showed up for the buy in a nursing uniform. She's in jail awaiting trial on felony drug dealing charges.

The Indiana Nurses Assistance Program or ISNAP was mandated by the Indiana legislature.

"Our ultimate goal is to protect the public from unsafe practitioners," said ISNAP Executive Director Ernie Klein.

ISNAP has a contract with the Indiana State Board of Nursing to help rehabilitate and monitor addicted nurses using monthly or quarterly reports, random urine drug screens and visits to addictionists.

Some in the program can be monitored while still working during their board probation. Others are monitored while serving the suspension of their licenses. The number of nurses in ISNAP has jumped 20 percent the last three years.

"So often, I think often nurses are simply terminated for having a disease of addiction,” said ISNAP's program director Chuck Lindquist.

Health care facilities are doing more to better track drugs. A system at Bloomington Hospital records who has access to drugs, making it harder for workers to steal and harder for them to cover it up.

But Bloomington's system couldn't stop one person from trying. Police said Mary Ann Edwards, a former nurse there, simply walked into the hospital in early April and entered patients’ rooms. Once nabbed by security, police claim she admitted trying to extract pain medication from a patient's IV. She's now awaiting trial.

For those nurses who are working legitimately, ISNAP builds in a safeguard.

“If a nurse has had a struggle with opiate addiction, when they go back into the workplace, we assure that they don't have access to controlled substances at least for six months while they're practicing as a nurse,” said Lindquist.

Vicki Hull has been sober for more than seven years and now works in a dialysis center.

"We're a very safe place for recovering nurses…because we don't have any drugs," she said.

In the general population, one person out of 10 likely has a substance abuse problem. But among nurses, Lindquist believes it's double that.

"I think it's a stressful environment working in the health care industry, easy access and availability to medications and drugs, the caretaking philosophy. Nurses are taught to care, often times at their own expense. So they're taking care of their patients, not taking care of themselves," said Lindquist.

State law mandates nurses who see misconduct must report it to their superiors, the Indiana Attorney General, or the nursing board.

Sean Gorman is the director of the nursing board.

"I would say probably 80 to 85 percent of all the complaints and disciplinary proceedings that the nursing board hears are in regards to substance abuse or use concerns," added Gorman.

Up to half of the nurses in the US are expected to retire in the coming decade, just as baby boomers begin to swamp the health care field. With a perpetual nursing shortage, some wonder if facilities are looking the other way when it comes to addiction.

Gorman believes that could be the case. "I wonder if that's not an aspect of the situation," he says.