A woman who staged a dinner honoring herself as "Nurse of the Year" will spend 9 months in prison for practicing nursing without a license.
Betty Lichtenstein, 57, of Danbury was working for Dr. Gerald Weiss in 2009, when Weiss complained to the Connecticut Department of Health that Lichtenstein had acted unprofessionally. An investigation found that Lichtenstein was never licensed to practice nursing.
During her employment, Lichtenstein injected patients with medicine, wrote prescriptions and gave medical advice to Weiss' patients, according to prosecutors.
Weiss and his staff believed Lichtenstein was a registered nurse partly thanks to a "Nurse of the Year" award given to her at a November 2008 dinner hosted by the "Connecticut Nursing Association".
Turns out the association doesn't exist, and Lichtenstein paid more than $2,000 of her own money to stage the dinner, prosecutors said.
She also forged several narcotics prescriptions for herself on blank forms she got from the doctor's office, according to the Chief State's Attorney's office.
She was sentenced to 9 months in prison Tuesday.
