Shanna Crosbie had acted as Gore mayor Ben Bell private personal assistant following his election in October. Photo: Supplied / Facebook
Gore Mayor Ben Bell is not responding to questions about when he learned that the woman who had been acting as his personal assistant was charged with forgery.
Shanna Crosbie was convicted in the Gore District Court in March of forging prescriptions for tramadol and codeine while working as a health coach out of the Gore Health Clinic.
She carried out the offending between August and September last year while working as a subcontractor in the clinic.
She sought a discharge without conviction and name suppression.
When Judge Russell Walker declined those applications, she appealed to the High Court.
Crosbie accessed the patient database and created false prescriptions for tramadol - a strong opioid pain medication - and forged a doctor's signature on it, Justice Gendall said.
She presented the forged prescriptions to a pharmacy on five occasions.
"Subsequently, Ms Crosbie attempted to repeat this process again to obtain another kind of pain medication, codeine, but was thwarted in her attempt by a malfunctioning printer. While Ms Crosbie did manage to obtain some codeine, as a result of the printer malfunctioning, Ms Crosbie's employer was alerted to the situation. Following this, Ms Crosbie immediately resigned."
The 38-year-old last year also acted as a private personal assistant to Ben Bell following his election in October.
She even travelled to Wellington with him to attend mayor's training.
Crosbie was Bell's neighbour.
Bell sought to have an executive assistant appointed permanently to his office, however, the council voted it down in late November.
The forgery charges were laid by police on 19 November.
Police spoke to her two days prior, but she declined an interview on advice from her lawyer, a police spokesperson said.
Stuff reported she was accompanied to her first court appearance on 21 December by Bell's mother Rebecca Tayler.
Tayler did not wish to comment when contacted by RNZ today.
At last year's local elections in October, Tayler was elected to the board of Gore and District Health Inc - which was the sole shareholder of Gore Health Limited and owned its assets including Gore Health Clinic and Gore Hospital.
Bell did not answer calls from RNZ, nor did he respond to messages seeking to find out when he learned of Crosbie's offending.
A council spokesperson said the council would not be commenting on the matter.
The spokesperson also advised Bell had emailed them to say he would not comment about Crosbie.
Gore Health 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," he said.
"She was employed as a sub-contractor, 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. So they decided to do that."
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 weary".
In a statement to RNZ, Active Southland chief executive Vanessa Hughey-Pol said: "This 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".
Justice Gendall's decision noted Crosbie had one dated conviction for drink-driving.
He also moved to reassure patients that their data was secure.
"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," Metzler said.
"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."
Gore Health's systems and procedures had been tightened since, Metzler said.
He was confident similar offending would be uncovered much sooner now.