Dive Brief:
- Former traveling radiology technician David Kwiatkowski has revealed how he stole painkillers while he worked for 19 different hospitals over the course of a decade (infecting some patients with hepatitis C in the process)—and how he continued to get jobs despite being caught multiple times.
- Kwiatkowski told Newsweek "how easy it is" and that "the structure of the hospitals isn't any good to stop it." He pleaded guilty in 2013 and is currently serving a 39-year jail sentence.
- Kwiatkowski's inside view could be invaluable in addressing concerns about the 100,000 healthcare workers estimated to be struggling with prescription drug issues.
Dive Insight:
Kwiatkowski's account of his activities suggests a disturbing lack of security in the healthcare industry, and perhaps an even more disturbing sense that hospitals may have preferred to sweep the issue under the carpet than to confront it.
He outlines the drug theft strategies that he typically found achievable:
- Getting assistance from a nurse who had drug access.
- Retrieving opioid vials from the garbage.
- Switching out fentanyl syringes with saline-filled syringes.
- Injecting drugs before switching out the needle and refilling the syringe with saline—the process that caused him to infect others with hepatitis C.
Kwiatkowski says none of the hospitals where he was caught ever filed an official report that could have caused his radiology tech license to be revoked, and some refused to disclose information about him to other potential employers.
Part of the problem stemmed from mistakes at staffing agencies; Maxim Staffing Solutions responded to a hospital's complaint that he tested positive for fentanyl by ordering a urine test rather than a blood test, so Kwiatkowski passed and was put back in circulation. After the agency Springboard determined that he was unhirable, Kwiatkowski simply moved on to another agency.
Kwiatkowski wasn't brought down until May 2012 when Exeter Hospital connected him to three patients diagnosed with hepatitis C and reported him to the New Hampshire Division of Public Health Services.
He says the only security precaution that ever stopped him was the pocket system, in which nurses kept the drugs in their pocket until it was time to administer them.