St. Mary’s – Pain Killer Thief

The families of patients in the palliative care unit at St. Mary’s of the Lake Hospital are in shock after the hospital discovered a nurse has been stealing a pain killer  for the past two-and-a-half years.

Providence Care issued a news release yesterday saying police are investigating after it learned last month a nurse on the palliative care unit has removed the drug…hydromorphone.  The internal investigation found patients may not have received their proper pain medication.

Providence Care says the investigation is trying to determine how much of the pain medication was stolen and how the nurse managed to remove it from the palliative care unit.

A special toll free phone number has been set up to handle inquiries from the families of patients.

Kingston Police are still investigating and say they haven’t laid charges yet.

Scott – Environmental Fines

A Kingston entrepreneur who sold his environmental company after being charged by the Ministry of Environment says he’s paying the fines himself after pleading guilty to environmental charges.

George Scott was in court yesterday and was fined $10,000 and his former company was fined $120,000 for storing industrial waste at its Fortune Crescent facility for longer than 180 days.

Scott Environmental was bought by Tomlinson Environmental Services last August.

Loyalist – Water System Upgrades

Relief may be on the way for some people who have had to live with brown drinking water in Loyalist Township.

The Township is getting $900,000 dollars from the federal government and $900,000 from the Ontario government for upgrades to its water system.

It will pick up the rest of the $3 million dollar tab for the project that includes water main replacement, sanitary sewer repairs, and storm sewer improvements.

Some of the work to improve the quality of drinking water has already started.

Friends for Life

200 cyclists will leave Kingston for Gananoque as part of the annual Friends for Life Bike Rally.  The 600 kilometre ride from Toronto to Montreal is raising money for the Toronto People with Aids Foundation.

Each cyclist has to raise at least $2,500 to participate and this year they’ve already raised more than a million dollars.

It was “Red Dress Day” yesterday and many riders wore red dresses as they cycled into Kingston.

The group spent the night in dorms at Queen’s University and will end today’s journey at the Grenville Park Campground east of Prescott.

Loyalist – Union

Negotiations with the help of a conciliator have failed to produce a contract agreement between Loyalist Township and about 60 unionized employees.

The township has request a no board report after meeting with representatives of CUPE and the conciliator yesterday.

It has given the union its final offer and requested CUPE have membership vote on the offer.

The big stumbling block for the union is a demand for greater flexibility in on-call scheduling.

A news release from Loyalist Township says its offer provides improvements to benefits and a generous wage increase over four years.

Queen’s Data Centre

The IT team at Queen’s University was put to the ultimate test on Sunday when the universities main data centre was knocked out.

All information systems at Queens were hit by the outage from around 11:30 Sunday morning until Monday morning.

The problem was caused by the when the fire suppression system in the main data centre was tripped.

All systems were up and running on Monday.