The Royal Guard has detained an employee at a Health Centre in La Laguna, on the island of Tenerife, and her son, for illicitly acquiring personal information from patients to fraudulently obtain medical prescriptions, particularly for opiates and psychotropic medications.
The individuals under arrest are a 45-year-old woman and her 22-year-old son, both residing in the mentioned Tenerife municipality. They have been accused of the crime of identity theft and fraud, as per the information shared by the Royal Guard on Monday.
These criminal activities took place at the end of 2023 when the woman, leveraging her position as a cleaning staff member at the La Laguna Health Centre, appropriated various personal details of patients and documents which she later handed over to her son.
Reportedly, using these unlawfully obtained details, the son scheduled telephone consultations at different health centres on the island to acquire prescriptions for medicines containing opiates or psychotropic substances. He would then impersonate a relative of the patient, visit pharmacies in several towns in the province with the stolen documents, and collect the medications.
The detainees, alongside the legal procedures carried out, have been presented before the Court of First Instance and Instruction number 4 of La Orotava on duty.
The law enforcement agency highlights that these unlawful actions have caused significant harm to the affected patients, who faced difficulties when trying to collect their medicines from pharmacies, as they had already been falsely claimed by the now arrested individual. Moreover, these crimes cause substantial financial losses to the Canary Islands Health Service.
