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The story
At Kishiwada Tokushukai Hospital in Kishiwada, Osaka Prefecture, it has come to light that a nurse, trying to calm down a violent inpatient, secretly took propofol — a powerful sedative classified as a controlled drug that had been prescribed for a different patient — and administered it without authorization. The hospital has since received administrative guidance. Yomiuri Shimbun Online reported the story on September 19. Propofol is normally an anesthetic used under a doctor’s orders during surgery or ventilator management, and misjudging the dose carries risks such as respiratory arrest. On 5ch, some users condemned the act as a clear violation, while many others pointed to the reality of night-shift staffing shortages that leave handling violent patients up to whoever’s on duty, sparking a debate over the need for clearer rules on sedative use.
Violent inpatient given powerful sedative: nurse secretly administered “another patient’s dose” without authorization… Osaka’s Kishiwada hospital receives administrative guidance
Published 9/19 (Sat) 9:00 AM
Yomiuri Shimbun Online
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / original article here
What people said
Probably told a coworker and got ratted out to the higher-ups
Maybe because the stock of the drug that got taken was running down faster than scheduled
Someone saw it happen
Even with nurse pay raises going on, quality is definitely dropping
They haven't actually raised pay, that's exactly why people keep quitting
If you're juggling near-death-by-overwork labor with customer-service duty on top, you'd need like two people's worth of salary for it to add up
That alone wouldn't get you caught
Someone must have snitched
Thought it was delirium but it turned out to be dementia. There really are people who slip in sleep aids without authorization — it happens a lot on night shifts
I think this can't really be helped — three staff cover close to 40 patients, and once someone's on break you're down to handling it solo
No way you can stay glued to one thrashing patient for 30 straight minutes
There are other patients to look after too
Nice work, future criminal
Get standing orders from the attending physician for agitation ahead of time, or ask the on-call doctor for instructions on the spot
I think I've heard something like that before
Yeah, I'm sure it happens there too
giving an IV dose to an 80-year-old is dangerous
and if it actually knocked them out peacefully, that's even more reason for concern
I was wondering, would 1ml (10mg?) really be enough to put someone to sleep?
So if that's what knocked them out peacefully, does that mean it's even more dangerous?
But right now it's against the law, and there's zero movement toward changing it
Only the feel-good rulebook that ignores what's actually happening on the ground gets to stand
Of course the frontline staff get tied down every single night by someone thrashing around, can't take care of the other patients, and it's brutal — so people keep quietly quitting one after another every month, and no new hires come in
Yeah
They're the ones who should be protected first, I'd say
Well there's no doctor standing right there when someone's thrashing, so what else can you do
Say that after you've dealt with a violent dementia patient yourself
If you're going to say it's wrong, go do her job yourself
You'd flip your opinion in an instant and agree using the drug was the right call…
See? It's messed up, right?
Instant-arrest territory
Before an arrest even comes into it, the family might just call the police, or it turns into physically restraining your rampaging old man — one or the other
If propofol just put him to a peaceful little sleep, isn't that actually the better outcome?
What's actually wrong is that there's no manual for calming down violent patients
If the law bans it, then the law needs to change
The ones who need protecting first are the nurses and doctors
Sedatives can be used through the proper channel, no problem
Even physical restraints are doable if you get the family to sign a consent form
But a controlled drug like this is straight-up assassination-level crime
In real life, when someone's actually thrashing around in front of you, is there even a manual for that?
There's absolutely something that could've been done differently — propofol can, worst case, stop someone's breathing, you know?
It didn't stop, so she clearly dosed it carefully lol
An ICU nurse would have that kind of knowledge
There's also the question of what the on-call doctor was doing — but dig into that and it's nothing but darkness
Why exactly is that not allowed?
A sleeping-pill-level drug would probably be fine, but this one's a surgical-grade anesthetic, so shouldn't unlicensed people be barred from handling it in the first place?
Because anti-social terrorists would abuse it
That's why it's not allowed
It'll escalate into another Uematsu (note: Satoshi Uematsu, perpetrator of the 2016 Sagamihara mass stabbing)
The Kashiwa IV-bag tampering case was anti-social terrorists too
The Yokohama Oguchi Hospital IV drip murder case was anti-social terrorists too
There's a rotten pile of terrorists out there
There's like 10 million murdered patients out there
Background and Key Points of This Story
Propofol is a sedative classified as a powerful/controlled drug, used for general anesthesia and for ventilator management in intensive care — it’s not a drug whose dosage a nurse is allowed to decide without a doctor’s orders. In this case, the nurse reportedly took and administered a dose that had been prescribed for a different patient without authorization, and a mismatch between recorded stock and actual usage appears to be what led to the discovery. It’s worth noting, since it’s easy to misread, that administrative guidance is not a criminal penalty but a corrective directive aimed at the hospital’s management system — a separate framework from arrest or prosecution. The thread paired a principled stance that “unauthorized use of a controlled drug is unacceptable” with a sympathetic view pointing to understaffing — “night shifts run on a skeleton crew covering dozens of patients, with virtually no real way to handle a violent patient, leaving it up to whoever’s on the floor” — and the discussion broadened into whether clearer rules for sedative use are needed. What’s easy to miss in the thread’s back-and-forth is that physical restraint and the use of psychotropic drugs normally require procedures like family consent and a doctor’s orders, and that skipping those steps is the real core of the problem.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Express+) thread “[Osaka] Violent inpatient given powerful sedative “Propofol” — nurse secretly administered “another patient’s dose”… Kishiwada Tokushukai Hospital receives administrative guidance.”
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