Chief executive Karl Metzler said he had concerns about Crosbie even before she began working at the clinic.
‘‘Ms Crosbie was not employed by Gore Health. She was employed as a subcontractor, she was employed by Active Southland, and that was despite our protestations.
‘‘We were reluctant to take her on, given that we knew some of her past history. We were somewhat reluctant to have her in our health facility.
‘‘Active Southland decided, given the current labour market and the compression and lack of capacity in the system, that they would take a chance on her and give her a third or fourth chance.’’
Mr Metzler would not elaborate on what he meant by those comments, other than to say ‘‘it’s a small rural community and we generally know potentially more than we should about people and we were wary’’.
Active Southland chief executive Vanessa Hughey-Pol said in a statement it ‘‘was a gross breach of trust by an individual who is no longer an employee of Active Southland’’.
‘‘Due to privacy issues we will not be commenting further’’.
Mr Metzler had every confidence in the organisation’s processes.
‘‘This was very much an isolated incident. She very much had a laser-like focus on what she was doing in terms of her drug-seeking behaviour.
‘‘It was very much a one-off incident.
‘‘Obviously, in the health sector we have to operate in a high trust environment and that trust was breached and it’s very, very unfortunate. But you can put all the checks and balances in place and people will find a way around them, and in this case she did.
‘‘It took knowing the system pretty well and pretty intricately to do what she did and so she had obviously spent significant time investigating how to beat the system and she did that.’’
Systems and procedures had been tightened since, he said.
