A FORMER nurse is facing a prison sentence after wearing a medical uniform to steal drugs from the hospital where she worked years earlier.
Emma Collinson, 39, accessed empty operating theatres in the middle of the night and broke into locked medicine cabinets to steal powerful painkillers.
She was caught after being captured on CCTV holding a carrier bag and wearing a nurse's outfit - despite having resigned five years before.
The images show Collinson using PIN codes apparently supplied by an insider or unchanged since she left Crosshouse Hospital in Ayrshire.
Audrey Rougvie, an operating theatre charge nurse, arrived at work at 7.30am to hear a colleague shouting: "There's been a break-in, get security."
Three operating theatres had been entered overnight, wall cupboards accessed and medicine cabinets forced open.
Mrs Rougvie told Kilmarnock Sheriff Court the theatres had a keypad entry system with a swipe card to access the changing room area. At the time, CCTV only covered the main corridor.
Clinical nurse manager Hazel Parsons said that theatres doors were undamaged but the "marked and dented" cabinets had been forced, adding: "It looked as if someone had been trying to get into them."
Empty boxes were strewn around and 40 ampoules of the powerful painkiller Tramadol were missing, along with a quantity of Midazolam, used to anaesthetise patients. Both drugs can be highly addictive.
Collinson told police she had resigned from Crosshouse Hospital as a registered nurse in 2009, following a "messy divorce" and later worked in a nursing home.
Sentence was deferred until later this month and she was freed on bail.
Court documents reveal Collinson, of Kilmarnock, has a drugs conviction from 1994, before she was employed as a nurse.
Liz Moore, director of acute services for NHS Ayrshire and Arran, said last night: "A person, not employed by NHS Ayrshire and Arran, was detected on our security systems acting suspiciously.
"We alerted Police Scotland and passed all information to them to take the appropriate action. Following this incident, we carried out a thorough review of our door security systems and have implemented new security measures."
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