Welcome to the Medical Legal Podcast, where healthcare meets the law. I'm Shauna Butler, nurse attorney. In each episode, we explore gripping real life stories at the intersections of medicine, ethics, and justice.
From headline-making cases to the behind-the-scenes legal dilemmas that healthcare workers face every day.
In big communities and smaller, lesser well-known ones. Whether you wish scrubs or a soup, these stories are compelling, thought-provoking, and deeply human.
Let's begin. Would you be surprised to go to work one day and expect it to be a regular day at work? Maybe a busy day, maybe a stressful day, maybe an overwhelming day, but it might surprise you if you walked out in handcuffs.
And ended up in a police cruiser to the police station. That might be a disturbingly to end your workday.
That's what happened to a nurse in Utah, Alexandra Wubbles.
Let's get started and let's talk about it. I'm Shauna Butler here, Medical Legal Podcast, nurse attorney, educator.
One day at work. This nurse was carrying on with her day.
Ended up, as I said. Being arrested.
In her workplace. She was actually doing the right thing.
She was arrested, essentially, for not drawing blood of a patient, but this was upon a police officer's request. Nurses don't take orders from police officers. We carry out nursing orders that are written by a physician or an advanced practice provider.
The lesson behind this is if… In the moment, you have a gut feeling that something isn't right, even if you don't know what it is. Stop.
Research it, look into it, look into policy, and reach out to your supervisors. Reach out to your managers, your leadership. Go up your chain of command. Use your available resources.
This is a disturbing case where this nurse ended up handling this issue on her own, and she shouldn't have. She should have had more support.
from her leadership. So, this was a patient who was in a car accident and was unconscious, and they were a victim of a car crash. They were not under arrest or anything like that. Sometimes our patients are under arrest while they are our patients.
That was not the circumstance here. The police come in, and they want this blood drawn.
The nurse does not do it, like I said, they… we don't, as nurses, follow orders from external people, right? We follow it from other healthcare providers.
with the authority to prescribe. Upon her refusal to draw the blood, the officers forcibly put her in handcuffs and into the passenger seat in the front of the car. Hmm, I don't know why, of the cruiser.
And, um, you know, she was, you know, arrested for obstructing justice, right? This was while she was on duty at the University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City. She's also a graduate of.
the University of Utah, that's where she received her nursing degree.
And as a side note, a little piece of trivia, she is also a very impressive person who was, um, a skier, an Olympic skier who was in, um, the Winter Olympic ski events in both 1998 and 2002.
unrelated to this, but shows you what an impressive person she is, and she's an ethical person, and apparently a great skier. Um… So, they wanted the blood alcohol level of that person who, you know, was unconscious, therefore unable to consent. She was looking into the policies at her workplace.
And, you know, it wasn't right, right? Sometimes, like, I can remember years ago as a new nurse, this didn't involve me, but it involved fellow coworkers, but it, you know, it went on my radar and it caught me to pay attention, because I was interested. What if that happened to me? And a patient's family member had come in.
And said, we want a copy of the medical record. It was, like, late at night, there were not a lot of people there, there was always a supervisor you can call, but, you know, in the moment they started photocopying the medical record. This is when we still had hard copy medical records, and weren't into electronic medical records like we have now.
And then, like, after a few pages, started to realize, hmm, I don't think I'm supposed to be doing this. So then they ended up calling the supervisor and said, you know, there's a formal way in which you can request the medical record, and it will get to you if you are authorized to have it.
This is, you know, a similar situation where she kind of had this gut feeling, they ended up arresting her. She was ultimately later released without charge, and the person who arrested her was actually fired.
And the supervisor, I guess for being in a supervisory role, or, you know, allowing this to happen, which was an inappropriate action, was demoted two ranks from lieutenant down to officer.
Wubbles and her attorney. Ended up suing, and they agreed to settle. It looks like she settled for about $500,000.
And, you know, she did good things, you know, with part of her settlement was going to efforts to, um, make body cam footage more accessible to the public. And if you look up her case, you can see videos and stills of her being arrested, and they are sort of manhandling her much.
you know, much to our surprise when this happened to us out in public on the street, which is never a fun thing for happen, but imagine this happening. You're in scrubs, you're taking care of your patients, and all I kept thinking of when I first heard about the case was.
You know, what am I doing about my patients as they're taking me away? Am I yelling out the thing, hey, the guy in room 12 hasn't had his antibiotic yet? Oh, you know, Miss is in room 18, you know, needs her insulin injection, like.
how you're, like, abandoning your patience, but it's against your will, and you… not by your choice, right? So, it's really a disturbing case. I'm glad that she was able to prevail in the end.
And I want to just remind people who might be nurses or healthcare clinicians in a workplace to always use your available resources. Don't worry alone. Use your chain of command. If you work in a big place, larger places, well-resourced hospitals.
We'll have supervisors, directors, a legal team of risk management team, a patient safety team, something called an AOC, which is an administrator on call, like nights, weekends, and holidays, you know, a higher level leader is AOC, who can always be called in these events. Now, I know what you might be thinking.
What do we do in smaller places? Don't forget that the places you work still need to have certain leadership, administrator on-call type things available for you. Now, if you work in a skilled nursing facility, it might have to be at the corporate level, but make sure you always know those numbers, who to call, because what will you do should this happen to you?
JUDY WOODRUFF, you can't just draw blood. You can't just give medical records. Things like warrants and subpoenas and all those things need to be provided, and you as a nurse are not expected to be a legal expert and understand those. So, what if they say, oh, I need this, this, and this, but the warrant actually only calls for a limited thing and you are not, you know, it's not your job to sit and just differentiate and figure out.
discrepancies in those pieces of legal document, right? So you do need somebody who is knowledgeable at the legal risk management leadership level to advise you on what's the appropriate thing to do. And ideally, they come in and support you and help you.
Now, if you work at a place that does have a police department associated, the police department should be facilitating that. So if you work at a big hospital that has its own police department, no police should be walking onto a random floor saying, hey, I need this, right? They should be talking.
to the hospital police department and asking for facilitation of that in your hospital police department should be protecting the patients, right?
They are, you know, they're. patients, clients, residents at that time.
So, I think it's really sad that this nurse sort of seemed to handle that on her own. I do believe that at one point she was sort of on a speaker call with somebody who was, like, a manager or a director, but obviously it didn't help prevent her from getting arrested.
And please remember, just because a police officer tells you something does not mean you automatically have to do it. That can be hard, right? They can be very forceful, and very… no, that's a law, you have to do it, and it can be scary if we don't understand the law. But at your workplace, you reach out to those people who can support you and help you and always check first.
They may need a warrant, a court order, a subpoena, and you are not expected to know this, so you confirm first, and you're always required to abide by HIPAA.
So HIPAA is federal law, and only people who can view things are like treatment, payment, operations. So that would never be a police officer, right? Unless maybe it was, like, a police officer on your forest of your hospital who was doing it for one of those.
Treatment payment operations purposes. So, you know, they would need one of those court orders.
As I speak about HIPAA, just a little side tip, always spell HIPAA correctly, H-I-P-A-A. Two A's, not two P's.
So, as the nurse, your primary duty is to the patient. It is not our duty to judge what brought our patients into us, but it is to support their needs. So, for example, if in this case.
the patient had been intoxicated and caused an accident. It is in our job to determine that. It's our job to take care of their injuries or any medical, you know, consequences to their actions. It's not our place to judge. Even if they do have a criminal record, they still deserve our care, and it isn't our place to get involved criminally.
We only write factually in the medical record about what we see. You know, if somebody is intoxicated, what makes you think they're intoxicated? Don't say, you know, they're acting drunk. You would say slurring their speech, unsteady gait, speaking nonsense, you know, whatever.
Document factually, always. And, you know, we may not always know the full story of our patients, and we may not understand. People have been falsely arrested, inappropriately arrested.
Much like this nurse, right? And we may not know the full story. Police often have an agenda that is different from ours, and our primary duty is always to our patient.
Yes, sometimes our patients may have broken the law, but we are non-judgmental caregivers.
This may not always be easy, but if we feel like we can't honor this, we must address this with a leadership to manage the patient the best way possible.
So who watches our patients? As I alluded to earlier, I'd be so nervous, like you're putting additional lives at risk by taking me away. I'm concerned about my other patients.
you know. What if this happened in an emergency department, where somebody who had been involved with police might end up? Emergency departments are usually very, very busy places, especially in big cities or even rural areas. They can be short-staffed.
And how will we manage the patients? So, she did ultimately prevail in this suit, but there's… that's after the trauma of what she went through, and went on for a time period, right? Like, you do not expect to go to work. You might expect to go to work and be busy and be overwhelmed and not be able to take a break and use the restroom and, you know, eat your lunch while you're documenting your notes.
But you don't think you're gonna leave in handcuffs in a police cruiser, right? That's not usually something. So, that would be traumatic for me. I think it would be traumatic for anyone. When you go to work, you might worry about a lot of things, right? Like a code, a death, a particularly challenging patient that might be combative.
You're commuting to work, heading home, or you're gonna be in traffic, but getting arrested is probably not typically high on the list for most nurses.
So just remember to follow your resources, follow your policies, know your chain of command, reach out to supervisors, know your leadership, know any phone numbers to call on off hours, no corporate headquarters numbers, and what to do when these types of situations happen.
Thank you for listening to Medical Legal Podcast. Happy to have you. Reach out with any questions or comments. Thank you.
Thank you so much for listening to the Medical Legal Podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps more listeners find the show.
And if you know someone who would find these stories compelling and interesting, share the podcast with them. Until next time, stay curious, stay informed, and take care. And to all my healthcare clinician listeners, always remember to practice in the best interests of every single patient.
Thank you.
