Nurse Craig Peske was fired from a hospital in Wausau, Wis., in 2007 after stealing the powerful painkiller Dilaudid “whenever the opportunity arose,” state records say. In one three-month period, he signed out 245 syringes full of the drug — nine times the average of his fellow nurses.
Hospital officials reported him to Wisconsin nursing regulators and alerted police.
Six months later, Peske was charged with six felony counts of narcotic possession. But by that time, he had used a special “multistate” license to get a job as a traveling nurse at a hospital 1,200 miles away in New Bern, N.C.
“When I went to go for the job in North Carolina, I looked at the status of my license and it was still active,” said Peske, 36, who was later convicted of two felony drug charges. “That kind of surprised me, so I figured I would take it.”
The ease of Peske’s move illustrates significant gaps in regulatory efforts nationwide to keep nurses from avoiding the consequences of misconduct by hopping across state lines.
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