Tennessee nurse wrote herself prescriptions for over 10,000 opioids and muscle relaxers
Tennessee nurse spent three years writing herself prescriptions for more than 10,000 opioid and muscle relaxer pills, documents reveal
- Patricia Tillis, 61 used a doctor’s pre-signed refill pad to prescribe to herself
- Between 2014 and 2017, she wrote prescriptions for 8,764 doses of oxycodone
- She also prescribed herself 2,880 of a potent muscle relaxer
- The Tennessee Department of Health has suspended her nursing license
Natalie Rahhal Health Reporter For Dailymail.com
A nurse in Tennessee wrote her self prescriptions for thousands of addictive, dangerous opioids before she was fired and her license was suspended.
Patricia Tillis, 61, wrote herself 104 prescriptions, including nearly 9,000 hydrocodone pills and close to 3,000 tablets of a muscle relaxer beginning in 2014.
She was finally fired in October 2017 after the Hughston Orthopedic Clinic caught her.
The Tennessee Department of Health announced this month that it had revoked the woman’s nursing license, the Tennessean reported.
Most opioid addictions are estimated to begin with a spare or two or a few prescription painkillers, filched or given from a friend or loved one’s over-supply.
Before being fired and losing her license, nurse Patricia Tillis, 61, used a pre-signed prescription pad to prescribe herself nearly 9,000 oxycodone pills and 3,000 muscle relaxers
On black markets, pills like hydrocodone may sell for as little as $2 per 5mg pill up to $20 each, meaning that someone with access to a prescription pad can easily rake in $600 a month reselling 30 days worth of doses.
Tennessee is one of the states hardest hit by the opioid epidemic, and Tillis’s story simply undermines the sometimes gaping holes in US systems for monitoring prescriptions.
According to documents from the Tennessee Board of Nursing, she had access to presigned prescription slips.
On them she filled in orders for 2,880 pills of the muscle relaxer, Soma.
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Tillis claims a doctor she worked with at Hughston had given her cart blanch to use the pad to write her own prescriptions.
She now alleges that the doctor ‘changed his story,’ when the Health Department came sniffing around for corruption.
Tillis said that she needed the pills to treat chronic pain from a past surgery.
But that would have meant that she needed nearly seven pills of hydrocodone a day, every day, between 2014 and her 2017 firing.
The former nurse is not denying that she did in fact write the prescriptions.
The state’s Board of found her to be ‘addicted to alcohol or drugs to the degree of interfering with nursing duties; guilty of unprofessional conduct; to wit: engaging in acts of dishonesty which relate to the practice of nursing,’ the report said.
Tillis wasn’t alone: the Board disciplined another seven nurses and one doctor for misconduct related to addiction during the month of August alone.
News of her fraudulent prescriptions comes a week after the Tennessean reported that patients from a local chain of pain clinics were struggling to get treatment after their clinic was shut down and their medical records were lost.
The state is struggling to both treat its under-served patients and crack down on the opioid epidemic.
Since 2010, the number of annual opioid deaths there has increased by more than 20-fold.
Despite the distribution of Naloxone and better monitoring, cases like Tillis still slip through the cracks.
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