The Piacenza police headquarters has executed a precautionary custody order under house arrest against a doctor on duty at the Emergency Room and the Territorial Emergency Service 118 of the Piacenza hospital, accused of drug trafficking, false deed public, embezzlement and fraud against the State.
«On the morning of Monday 28 October – reports the Piacenza police headquarters in a press note – a personal and local search decree was executed, extending to the vehicles and workplaces of the arrested person and four other suspects, including including a further general practitioner on duty in Piacenza, all subjected to criminal proceedings for complicit drug dealing, as well as for further serious types of crime, all of which are being ascertained and defined”.
«The investigation – states the police – was born in the wake of the media outcry caused by the arrest in flagrante delicto for corruption carried out at the beginning of August against a general practitioner who dispensed prescriptions for opiate drugs, a fact which alarmed the entire Piacenza health sector, allowing the emergence of other worrying situations which would probably have remained dormant and about which targeted investigations are still underway by investigators”.
The police headquarters reports that at the end of August, «the Health Directorate of the Local Health Authority reported to the Public Prosecutor’s Office that it had received a report from an unspecified pharmacy in Piacenza regarding an abnormal quantity of packs of “morphine hydrochloride of 10 MG in vials” prescribed by a general practitioner to a medical colleague on duty at the civil hospital of Piacenza, a quantity exceeding one thousand vials. The pharmacy, finding the prescription suspicious, contacted the prescribing doctor directly to ask for confirmation who, consequently, stopped prescribing morphine to his colleague.”
«The latter – we read in the note – in a completely arbitrary and subsequently totally out of control way, in order to continue his criminal activity, directly began to prescribe morphine to a third other person, an acquaintance of his and known to the police. order as a cocaine user”.
«The Piacenza Local Health Authority Directorate forwarded the report directly to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, but the immediate investigations delegated to the Flying Squad made it possible to ascertain a much more serious situation which, in the total absence of internal controls, had persisted since at least the beginning of the year , with multiple reports received from local pharmacies, all agreeing in describing a conduct worthy of further investigation and suspicion regarding the lawfulness of the behavior carried out by the emergency room doctor 118 and worthy of urgent checks, also given the delicate task carried out by the operator the healthcare profession”.
«The investigations carried out by the Flying Squad, with services in the provincial territory as well, have revealed how the hospital doctor procured enormous quantities of morphine almost daily through the pharmacies, which were involved from time to time. The supply of the narcotic drug took place in a now spasmodic manner; in fact, it emerged in at least two circumstances, shared by the Ausl Directorate itself, that the victims of road accidents to whom the doctor declared he had administered morphine had tested strangely negative in tests for drugs”.
«The investigative activity, supported by very high precision technological devices of the audio/video type even on board vehicles, has revealed how the doctor arrested today formally prescribed morphine to friends and acquaintances, and then directly collected these narcotic drugs by means of of accomplices or directly in person. The morphine prescriptions were made out to third parties, with consolidated methods aimed at evading any controls and in some cases even with the approval of the same people”.
«The prescriptions were drawn up directly indicating the telephone number of the prescribing doctor at the bottom so that any complaints from the pharmacists reached the prescriber himself directly, who could confirm the veracity of the prescription without causing intervention by the police or the police. Health Management for prescription control. This is no small detail, given that the prescription carried out by a doctor of the emergency/urgency service 118 for a patient would still have triggered checks as it was a prescription not prescribed by the general practitioner who assists the patient”.
«In the healthcare environment it was well known that the doctor in question could steal morphine potentially destined for patients, so much so that in recent months procedures had been prepared aimed at guaranteeing the control of morphine by professional nurses this time, but these initiatives had revealed to be unsuitable, as the doctor probably succeeded in his aim of supplying by virtue of his professional qualification”.
«During the investigation, it emerged that some health workers had reported serious doubts about their colleague’s work, but no measures had been taken against the doctor, despite the high number of prescriptions exceeding a thousand, all quantified by the Management itself. Healthcare”.
«In light of the enormous danger to which both the patients and the colleagues of the doctor under investigation were exposed, after rapid investigations carried out also with audio/video telephone and environmental interceptions, with satellite localization systems, the Public Prosecutor’s Office requested and obtained from the investigating judge the issuing of the precautionary measure in question”.
«During the course of this investigation, a great cross-section of illegality emerged, with an enormous amount of morphine that the unfaithful doctor obtained from pharmacies and also through the hospital itself during the work shift, abusing his qualification in the exercise of its functions.
What was ascertained also occurred thanks to the collaboration of another general practitioner and a few other personal acquaintances, all facilitated not only by the absence of checks by the AUSL, but also by the absence of healthcare personnel willing to formalize what happened to their superiors, who could have consequently activated the due and necessary controls and ethical-disciplinary obligations which would have prevented the situation from degenerating into the criminal framework described above”.
