elegua
08-30-2007, 04:55 PM
Howdy folks,
Around the year 2000, I had a friend who was about to enter medical school. In the last two summers of university before med school, he volunteered at a local hospital (a well-regarded university hospital). He wasn't quite a candy striper, as he didn't interact with the patients, but instead did work that was sort of just below the most menial of orderly tasks -- cleaning up rooms after a patient leaves (not as a janitor, but picking up medical & biohazard items and the like). One thing that was interesting, every single day he'd find multiple vials of fentanyl, dilaudid, and morphine, along with the occasional versed. They'd all be used, but were rubber-topped and most were at least half-full. His job entailed him to take these things and toss them in biohazard waste box, and because he didn't want to risk his medical career, he only took maybe 1 out of every 20 vials available. What strikes me as amusing is that this volunteer had more access to decently large quantites of opiates than any doctor or nurse at the hospital! There was also no oversight -- nobody was counting the vials after they were dumped into the biohazard container. Doctors ordering opiates for inhouse procedures had to plug a code into a machine which would dispense the meds (this was one of the first hospitals to have those medicine-delivery robots in America...but once the procedure was over, nobody cared about the leftovers. If he really wanted, he could probably have picked up as much as 200 half-full bottles of quality, fresh opiates in any given summer of volunteering.
Does anyone know if this loophole has been closed up? Or should the humanitarians here consider a month or two of volunteer work? :D
Around the year 2000, I had a friend who was about to enter medical school. In the last two summers of university before med school, he volunteered at a local hospital (a well-regarded university hospital). He wasn't quite a candy striper, as he didn't interact with the patients, but instead did work that was sort of just below the most menial of orderly tasks -- cleaning up rooms after a patient leaves (not as a janitor, but picking up medical & biohazard items and the like). One thing that was interesting, every single day he'd find multiple vials of fentanyl, dilaudid, and morphine, along with the occasional versed. They'd all be used, but were rubber-topped and most were at least half-full. His job entailed him to take these things and toss them in biohazard waste box, and because he didn't want to risk his medical career, he only took maybe 1 out of every 20 vials available. What strikes me as amusing is that this volunteer had more access to decently large quantites of opiates than any doctor or nurse at the hospital! There was also no oversight -- nobody was counting the vials after they were dumped into the biohazard container. Doctors ordering opiates for inhouse procedures had to plug a code into a machine which would dispense the meds (this was one of the first hospitals to have those medicine-delivery robots in America...but once the procedure was over, nobody cared about the leftovers. If he really wanted, he could probably have picked up as much as 200 half-full bottles of quality, fresh opiates in any given summer of volunteering.
Does anyone know if this loophole has been closed up? Or should the humanitarians here consider a month or two of volunteer work? :D