A Florida nurse made a swap — surgery patients got saline, she shot up their fentanyl
Some patients at a Jensen Beach outpatient surgery center got saline during their surgeries instead of the pain-killing fentanyl that’s part of normal surgical anesthesia, a Port St. Lucie nurse admitted.
Registered nurse Catherine Dunton also admitted stealing the fentanyl, filling the vials with saline and shooting the fentanyl into her bloodstream while working at the Surgery Center at Jensen Beach.
That’s all in Dunton’s Fort Pierce federal court guilty plea to tampering with a consumer product. She is scheduled to be sentenced June 27 by U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon.
Along with her freedom, Dunton is likely to lose her registered nurse license. The Florida Department of Health started the discipline process with an administrative complaint that posted Sept. 8.
Dunton is already under an Aug. 23 emergency restriction order (ERO) that operates like a suspension. The order says Dunton can’t practice nursing until an evaluator from the Intervention Project for Nurses (IPN) tells the Florida Department of Health that Dunton’s not a danger to patients.
This isn’t Dunton’s first ERO — or, state documents say, her first incident stealing fentanyl or other drugs for personal use.
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Fentanyl and Dunton’s damage done
Dunton’s Florida Department of Health online license profile says she has been licensed as a registered nurse since July 7, 1993. Discipline documents from 2012 say she was fined $200 and put under IPN monitoring after a positive test for fentanyl in March 2012 while working at Port St. Lucie’s Lawnwood Regional Medical Center. She completed that monitoring in 2017.
But the most recent ERO says Dunton admitted to IPN evaluator Dr. Lawrence Wilson that she began stealing Demerol, morphine, Percocet and fentanyl from Lawnwood for personal use in 2008. She entered a monitoring contract with IPN.
While under IPN monitoring in 2009, Dunton told Wilson, she drank a bottle of wine or four to five vodka drinks per day during the first three years of her IPN contract. IPN monitoring didn’t prevent her from stealing and shooting up, she said, 50 to 1,000 micrograms of Lawnwood’s fentanyl at least three days a week.
Dunton resumed drinking at her previous rate by March 2021, this time accompanied by blackouts. She still managed to be hired at the Surgery Center at Jensen Beach Sept. 20, 2021.
She couldn’t handle it.
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Dunton at the Surgery Center
As a circulating nurse, her guilty plea says, an occasional part of her job was getting controlled substances during surgeries.
“She would then deliver the controlled substance to another staff member or administer the controlled substance directly to the patient under the doctor’s supervision,” Dunton’s guilty plea says. “The Center required staff to document the removal and use of any controlled substance on the controlled substance inventory log kept by the controlled substance cabinet.”
The emergency restriction order said Dunton “admitted she knew there were occasions when the patients would receive only saline.”
An April 18, 2022, inventory of controlled substances revealed a 25-vial box of fentanyl was missing. Another employee noticed “numerous tampered vials and several fentanyl boxes that initially appeared sealed, but the rear plastic had actually been cut open. These boxes appeared to have been accessed from the back or rear to remove vials.”
Dunton told investigators she’d take off “a vial’s cap, removing the entire dose of fentanyl, and replacing the contents with saline...After removing the vial’s cap, the defendant explained that she used a tool to recap the top of the vial. She then returned that tampered vial to the controlled substance cabinet in exchange for a new vial, repeating the process.”
She admitted shooting up at work and at home.
She admitted to using saline and needles from the Center as part of the tampering process and self-administering the fentanyl. She self-administered fentanyl at work and at her home in St. Lucie County.
“She advised that she was aware that her actions caused patients to not receive their prescribed dose of fentanyl due her replacing the contents of the vials,” Dunton’s guilty plea said. “[Dunton] denied hearing any negative reporting or patients reporting higher levels of pain than expected at the facility.”
Dunton’s admission of facts says Maryland anesthesiologist Dr. Arthur Simone was prepared to testify that, as fentanyl is part of the overall anesthesia function during surgery, a patient might move when they shouldn’t during surgery. Also, there’s an “elevated risk of clinically significant increases” in heart attack or stroke.