Posted on 06/17/2005 5:35:23 AM PDT by Born Conservative
Prescription medication was stolen from a locked cabinet. Four patients are doing well.
WILKES-BARRE – Four teenagers at a residential mental health facility overdosed Thursday on prescription medication stolen from a locked cabinet, said an official at the treatment center.
Staff at the BridgeView facility on New Hill Street discovered that the four teenage patients had overdosed on Thorazine, a prescription sedative, shortly after 11 a.m.
Paramedics and police responded and transported the teenagers to Wilkes-Barre General Hospital. Joe DeVizia, president of the Children’s Service Center, which operates the residential facility, declined to indicate the ages of the patients. Male and female patients were involved, he said.
“Unfortunately the kids got some medication and they took it,” DeVizia said.
The children, he said, appear to have broken into a locked medicine cabinet at the 52-bed facility that treats children ages 12 to 18.
“We’re still trying to determine how they got into it,” DeVizia said. “We just don’t know exactly how that happened.”
The children remained at the hospital into the afternoon and DeVizia did not know when they would be released. The four patients were doing well, he said, and “are as healthy as they can be at this point.”
“This is just very unfortunate,” he said.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the staff of the facility had determined that the children had taken Thorazine, but DeVizia said there was a possibility that they might have taken other drugs as well. The staff was in the process of inventorying the medication that remained in the cabinet, he said.
Police are aiding the facility in its investigation, DeVizia said.
Sometimes kids can bring drugs in when they go out to a home visit,” he said. But that possibility has been ruled out, he said.
DeVizia said this is the first time such an incident has occurred at the BridgeView facility opened late last summer. He did not know how long the four children involved had been patients.
Children’s Service Center is a Wilkes-Barre-based mental health organization headquartered on South Franklin Street. In 2003, more than 3,500 children received treatment there.
3500 kids in one year? Wilkes Barre sure isn't what it used to be.
Not even close to what it used to be...
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