Craig Lohgan and Rebecca Couchman, who also use the surname McLaren, face charges related to using altered documents to obtain class B controlled drugs morphine and fentanyl, when they operated a private ambulance.
Craig Lohgan and Rebecca Couchman, who also use the surname McLaren, face charges related to using altered documents to obtain class B controlled drugs morphine and fentanyl, when they operated a private ambulance.
A former private ambulance operator wept as she and her husband were found guilty of the majority of the charges they faced relating to how they accounted for their use of controlled drugs.
Rebecca Couchman was found guilty of all charges she faced, while Craig Lohgan was acquitted of two– one of obtaining by deception, and one of possession of morphine.
The Crown case was the pair created a false document trail, altering old patient report forms to account for their use of narcotics.
The defendants told the court they’d injected oranges and bananas with actual doses of morphine and fentanyl as training exercises, and that’s why the “training forms” were submitted as part of an audit into their use of narcotics.
Craig Lohgan and Rebecca Couchman, who are married and use the surname McLaren, faced 34 charges, including forgery, obtaining by deception, using an altered document, and administering and possessing a class B controlled drug.
The key issue in the trial was what the pair intended when they created fake, framed university qualifications, and altered patient report forms.
They were also accused of “ticking a box” on a form allowing them to order controlled drugs from a wholesale pharmacy, without the medical director’s knowledge. They were convicted on one charge related to this, but Lohgan was acquitted on the other.
However, Couchman’s lawyer Martin Hine said the pair was community-minded and clinically trained, and the Kawerau and Edgecumbe-based ambulance service was not set up with the purpose of procuring Class B drugs.
He pointed the finger at the medical directors – GPs the ambulance service relied on to sign “standing orders” allowing them to legally administer controlled drugs – stating they failed to provide oversight.
Four GPs, who all have name suppression, held the role of “medical director” at different times during the offending.
Former ambulance director was ‘devious’, defence says
Hine said former co-director Graeme Erickson was a “clear villain” who “loomed large”, and was responsible for liaising with the medical directors and the “chaotic” system of ordering prescriptions.
Erickson pleaded guilty and was sentenced, in 2022, on two representative charges of administering and possessing a class B drug, and using an altered document.
The defendants claim Erickson administered morphine, after standing orders had lapsed, without their knowledge.
Lohgan said he’d set up private ambulance service Emergency Medical Care (EMC) because he wanted to “give back”.
But he had health issues and “multiple injuries”, including a “bullet to the brain”, and a broken back that left him incapacitated and in the care of Couchman from late 2017.
If Erickson hadn’t stepped into the role of general manager, the “doors would have shut”.
Lohgan said while he was “flat on [his] back” most of the time, he sometimes had limited involvement, including in training.
“Graeme would come in and say ‘blah blah blah, sign this’,” Lohgan said.
He also claimed Erickson sent emails, produced as evidence, from his email address, purporting to be him.
The Crown says blaming Erickson, who wasn’t a witness in the trial, was a “ploy”, and the three of them had been “in it together”.
Coulson questioned why Lohgan would have left the business entirely to Erickson, a man who had previously been in an alleged abusive relationship with Couchman, and whom Lohgan described as “abusive, controlling, and devious”.
Lohgan says he wanted to give Erickson “a chance”.
The Crown says all three had fake qualifications framed on the wall of their office – to bolster their credibility – and all three were involved in the altering of patient report forms to satisfy the audit.
Coulson said they held themselves out to be more qualified than they were, deceiving medical directors who’d been too trusting.
‘Absurd’ to inject ‘oranges and bananas’ with drugs, Crown says
The bulk of the charges relate to using an altered document to obtain class B drugs.
The Crown says the defendants, along with Erickson, doctored old patient report forms to account for the “huge” quantity of drugs they were ordering, to satisfy the medical director, and keep the supply of drugs flowing.
However, the defence says they were just “training forms”, reproduced when they practised administering drugs, roleplaying different treatments, and ensuring staff knew how to fill out the forms correctly.
The Crown says the explanation “lacks credibility”.
It was “absurd” for the defendants to claim it was because they used “box after box” of “highly controlled drugs” in training, “injecting into bananas and oranges”.
Coulson said even a defence witness, an experienced nurse, said if you were practising administering IV lines you would use saline.
He questioned the “smashing, dropping, tripping” on the training forms, and also references to drugs being “drawn in haste” and then dumped.
“Where is the urgency when injecting a piece of fruit?” Coulson said.
Quantity of drugs a ‘red herring’, says defence
However, Hine said while there may have been “shortcomings”, and even incompetence or carelessness, that did not amount to criminal conduct, and under the standing orders at the time, the defendants were “authorised to possess and administer drugs”.
There was no evidence, Hine said, that the altered forms allowed the continued supply of drugs.
Following the audit, the medical director resigned and did not issue any further prescriptions.
Hine said the quantity of drugs ordered was a “red herring”, not the subject of charges, and was just part of the narrative to “blacken” the defendants’ reputations.
“If the ordering was excessive that was a matter for the medical director,” Hine said.
Hine said there had been a failure by all of the medical directors in respect of due diligence and oversight, but this was not the defendants’ fault.
He said the fake qualifications were only intended as aspirational “vision boards”.
When Couchman told police in an interview that the pair did have the qualifications, it was because she was “clearly stressed”.
Judge David Cameron told the jury, in summing up, that if they were satisfied Couchman had lied to police about credentials from overseas universities, that didn’t necessarily make her guilty, as people lied for all sorts of reasons.
While they could take it into account in terms of her veracity, it was just one piece of evidence.
The jury was sent out to deliberate on Tuesday morning.
HannahBartlettis a Tauranga-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She previously covered court and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that was a radio reporter at Newstalk ZB.
