Welcome to the Medical Legal Podcast, where healthcare meets the law. I'm Shawna 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. Have you ever thought about those disturbing angels of mercy cases where nurses or other healthcare clinicians intentionally?
Do acts that either murder or harm. patients, and then they become like on these crime podcasts or on Dateline episodes, and you think, like, that's so wild, how could that happen?
And this is why, like, knowing a little bit more about these can be so important and affect your life and your practice if you're a clinician, is.
What we, as somebody who maybe works with one of those people, is a coworker to them, how could we prevent it or look into it? Stick around, we'll cover some of that in this episode. And you can find my criminalization of malpractice course.
On my website at nurse attorneyeducator, all one word dot com. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.
All the links are below. and will be included in the show notes.
Let's get started.
So there is a disturbing case we're going to discuss today.
Patients were harmed. babies in a neonatal intensive care unit in Virginia.
And it reached the new United States national media earlier this year.
These babies. So, 4 different infants suffered fractures in the NICU.
And the nurse was asked to take paid administrative leave while the events were investigated.
Unfortunately. There was not sufficient evidence to enforce her termination, so the nurse was brought back to the NICU to care for these patients.
Weeks later, three more babies were found to have suffered fractures as well.
The original suspect, the nurse, who had returned to the NICU after that brief investigation, was eventually, ugh, disturbingly seen on camera abusing one of the infants. She was then arrested.
The current investigation is reviewing hundreds of hours of tape and plans to proceed forward with criminal prosecution.
According to the local sheriff's office, the nurse has been charged with malicious wounding and felony child abuse for events that allegedly occurred in 2023 and 2024.
One of the most disturbing facts about these events is the nurse is white, and all the patients were black.
This is so utterly reprehensible, involving medically fragile babies, and that it is related to racism directed at these.
Most vulnerable babies and their families who rely on nurses to ethically care for them.
These are the most fragile, vulnerable times in a baby's life and their family member's life, right? And you rely on these nurses to be trusted professionals, like people who are there when you can't be there and providing and administering all the things that.
you know, healthcare clinicians do for their patients. A nurse targeting Black vulnerable babies is scary, and it can further perpetuate the lack of trust in the medical and nursing community that already exists.
you know, we already know. that black women suffer far more.
Complications in childbirth, some as serious as death. So there's already a pre-existing scientific, data-backed reason to mistrust the profession, right?
And the harm that has caused and future harm that can be caused by this mistrust in the profession just cannot be underscored enough.
So what can you, as a clinician do? How can you prevent this? You think, like, I'm so busy taking care of my patients, I can't be, like, watching over other people.
some things that we can do to be aware.
Pay attention to red flags. It is necessary to address our own situational awareness abilities. Have you heard of that term situational awareness? Some of you probably have and some of you may not have.
And it can help with these issues and how to confront when they do occur.
Due to our duty to our patients, we must acknowledge and study those tragic and disturbing event… disturbing events that may portray clinicians in a negative fashion. Now, I don't like to talk about things that portray my beloved, trusted profession negatively.
But that would make me a hypocrite if I didn't investigate further and do things to try to improve and make them better. I want my patients to feel safe, to feel that they are in the most trusted place and the safest place they can be when they're in the care of a nurse.
So we have to keep our eyes open. We have to keep our radar up, pay attention, and then intervene when dangerous and potentially harmful behavior is occurring in a practice setting where we are employed.
What is situational awareness exactly? How can we practice it? It is a dynamic state of conscious awareness that includes multiple cognitive factors, cognitive factors, including memory and learning from past similar experiences.
Now, you're very busy. This will evolve the longer you are a nurse or a clinician in whatever healthcare discipline that you practice in.
You're already probably better than when you first started, even if you don't know it.
Being aware of our surroundings and refining our situational awareness skills may help to avoid some of these dangerous scenarios.
Think of this the way we refine and improve our patient assessment skills over time.
The same can be said for our own situational awareness skills over time as we broaden our understanding of this concept.
So pay attention when clinicians around you are having issues, and I'm not suggesting you stalk them and follow them around, but keep your antenna up. Pay attention. If you walk by and you see something that doesn't seem right going on in a patient room with an interaction with a healthcare clinician.
You know, don't call them out, don't confront them in front of patients. We don't want to make patients feel unsafe. Say, hey, Mary, can I talk to you for a second? Can you come out here and say, hey, it looked like you were about to, um… Do an IV push on a drug that's intended to be on an IV pump for safety, right?
And, you know, maybe they have an explanation. Oh no, I was just drawing it up, I wasn't ready, I hadn't connected the IV pump yet, I was waiting for it to be delivered to the room, and they might have a legitimate reason, so that's why we don't call people out, right? We confront diplomatically, respectfully, professionally.
And they might have a reason. If not, maybe it's also a teaching opportunity and they, you know, completely didn't realize that needed to be on a pump or something, you know, whatever. I'm just kind of throwing out an example off the top of my head. So those are the types of things. So pay attention. I mean, if all of a sudden pattern recognition, which is part of situational awareness that you see these same things keep happening when this particular nurse is on staff.
Or those patients all suffer some sort of complication when that nurse is working. You know, those are patterns you recognize.
So, what can we do about these things, right? Overall, the overwhelming majority of nurses and healthcare clinicians are safe clinicians. These types of events are usually isolated events, and the reason we see significant media coverage is because they are so disturbing and unusual.
And fortunately, the majority of crimes that are reported to the boards of nursing are actually not patient-related, they're not, like, criminals such as this particular disturbing, abhorrent case.
This does not diminish the severity of these types of alarming cases, so facilities really should have policies and support available. So do you have to reach out, use your chain of command, speak to your supervisor, your director, your leader?
In improving your situational awareness cares, knowing where your supports are, you know, having some… having a supportive community to reach out to, you know, family and friends. Obviously, you can't speak to details, but talk.
about your feelings, oh, I'm having a stressful event at work, and I'm really trying to process it, you know, but you can't, obviously, for hip or confidentiality laws, discuss the details, but you could just talk about your feelings around a challenging event at work. And then, in work situations, your leadership.
employee assistance, whatever it is in your workplace that is peer support or clinician support programs, use those. So our main takeaway is, you know, our situational awareness, know our chain of command, what services are available to us, and pay attention, because.
The best thing to do is to always be concerned for the patients. We're all very busy, we're running around caring for our multiple patients, regardless of the setting that we work in, or the floor that we work in.
And just always remember, like I always say here in the Medical Legal Podcast, that practice in the best interest of the patient standard is the best legal advice that I can give.
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.
