Quick Summary: Stealing a patients medications is grounds to terminate a nurses employment.  However, the evidence must be conclusive to justify such action.

   In this case, forty of one-hundred twenty pain pills were reported missing by a retirement community resident from a bottle of pills he kept in his bathroom. The nurse in question had come to the residents assistance earlier that day when he fell out of bed and had called two other nurses to assist in getting the resident back in bed. Then the nurse returned by himself after the others had left, to fetch his stethoscope and blood pressure cuff he had left in the residents bathroom near the medicine chest. The nurse ended up talking to the resident at length, forgot his equipment, and had to come back again to get it.