By all accounts, Kristen Parker was a fine surgical tech during her 7 weeks of per-diem employment at the Audubon Surgery Center in Colorado Springs, Colo. "Very charismatic and very impressive" is how Administrator Brent Ashby remembers the young lady on our cover. "She was a good tech. She knew her stuff. And she looked like the all-American girl."

Except all-American girls don't shoot themselves up with fentanyl and then put dirty hypodermics filled with saline back on the surgical tray before a procedure, denying patients pain relief and exposing them to incurable hepatitis C, which Ms. Parker knew she had a raging case of.

"If she was doing drugs here, we couldn't detect it from her behavior or demeanor," says Mr. Ashby. "She was experienced and she knew what she was doing."

As a surgical tech or as a drug abuser?

"Both."

Before turning herself in to police on June 30 and giving a tell-all confession (see "Scrubbed and Stoned" on page 40), Ms. Parker was a cunning, unconscionable addict who'd stop at nothing to feed her need for fentanyl.

Rose Medical Center in Denver hired Ms. Parker in October 2008, then fired her in April after she was caught in an OR where she wasn't assigned and subsequently tested positive for fentanyl. Twenty-one days later, her references checking out and a urine test for street drugs coming back clean, she began work at Audubon. A criminal background check, a blood test and a peek at the racy pictures and rants and raves she posted on her social networking sites — "I have a crazy fascination with needles. I just like the way they feel!" she wrote on her MySpace page — would have revealed Ms. Parker's dirty little secrets.

"You have to have a certain level of trust with your employees working as a team back there," says Mr. Ashby. "They have access to all sorts of stuff. It doesn't matter how tightly you lock things up. No mater how careful you are, someone with criminal intent can mess you up pretty badly."

Drug diversion in the OR is hardly uncommon. More than half (53%) of the 118 readers we surveyed last month have either caught staff stealing drugs (42%) or suspected that they were doing so (11%).

Mr. Ashby hopes that all 1,200 patients who had surgery during the 7 weeks Ms. Parker worked at Audubon test negative for hepatitis C. But the damage is already done to the ASC's reputation, staff morale and bank account — the cost of hep C testing will run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"You can't measure the impact this has had on our facility," he says. "How do you quantify the amount of damage that's been done?"