Kristen Parker Sentenced for Fentanyl Theft

January 18th, 2010. By LucyC

About a year ago a woman named Kristen Diane Parker, a surgery tech who worked in hospitals the Denver area, made the news, including on LawyersAndSettlements.com. I wrote a couple of short pieces about her. She was addicted—maybe still is—to Fentanyl.

Also known as Duragesic, Fentanyl is a prescription pain medication—quite a strong one—and quite an addictive one by all accounts. Kristen Parker was so addicted to the stuff that she would steal syringes from hospital surgery carts where she worked—syringes that were filled with Fentanyl—and inject herself. She would then fill the used syringes with saline and replace them. Just in case this isn’t crystal clear—post-operative patients were being administered saline in used syringes instead of their prescribed pain medication.  

Ah, but it gets worse. Parker ended up infecting some 36 people with hepatitis C, a currently incurable viral infection which leads to chronic liver inflammation, and in some cases liver cancer. Parker, who shared needles when injecting heroine, is hepatitis C positive—something she claims she didn’t know when she was fixing her needles.

Thankfully, Ms. Parker got careless, and she got caught. No surprise there, given the state she must have been in: Fentanyl is 80 to 100 times stronger than morphine. Eventually, another hospital employee did become suspicious, but only after she was pricked by a needle protruding from Parker’s pocket. So she was fired from that hospital and hired less than a month later at hospital in Colorado Springs, just south of Denver. 

Over the course of her work she put some 6,000 people at risk for hepatitis C. That’s nothing short of staggering.

If you recall Fentanyl patches—or Duragesic pain patches—were the subject of nationwide recalls as recently as 2008. People were nearly dying from overdoses of the drug that resulted from defected patches.

So how does a technician wander the halls of post-op high on Fentanyl and not get noticed? And how does she continue to slip through the cracks and get hired in hospital after hospital?

We may never know, but it is cause for concern. Prescription drugs are prescription for a reason and they are administered in hospitals presumably under the care of a physician. While the blame for the failure of the system to protect patients cannot be laid at any one person’s or department’s door, I am left wondering just how patients are supposed to protect themselves from this type of scenario if the system can’t? Ultimately, who is accountable? And more importantly—whose responsibility is it to try and remedy the flaws?

For the time being, it seems we are left with the justice system. This afternoon, Ms. Parker has her face on the front of MSNBC.com US News section because she is about to be sentenced to 20 years in prison on charges of tampering with a consumer product and obtaining a controlled substance by deceit or subterfuge. But where’s mention of the 36 people whose lives she has changed forever?

Tags: Fentanyl, Kristen Parker

This was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Drugs/Medical . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.