I'd heard about this but hadn't read about it until this article was emailed to me.
Honestly, in my opinion, it wouldn't really be THAT hard to get away with in the Critical Care setting. Does anyone disagree?
I mean, YES, OF COURSE I am surprised by this, but it's not unreasonable to think that there could have been many instances in a 16 year career were an ICU nurse could take a life. Opinions? (article below)
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/...in610047.shtml
Did Hospitals 'See No Evil'?
April 4, 2004
See No Evil
Charles Cullen, a critical care nurse, claimed he'd killed as many as 40
patients during his career. (Photo: CBS)
"When it comes to health care, why wouldn’t these people care? ... All
these people are dead. If they would have stopped this man back in 1998,
look how many people would still be alive."
Kris Toth
If Cullen's confession is accurate, it would make him one of the worst
serial killers in U.S. history. (Photo: CBS)
(CBS) When police in New Jersey arrested a male nurse on suspicion of
murder this past December, he made a startling confession.
Charles Cullen, a critical care nurse, claimed he'd killed as many as 40
patients over the course of his nursing career.
Immediately, questions arose: How could Cullen continue to work at 10
different hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, over a period of 16
years, despite the fact that at seven of those hospitals, he was
investigated, fired or forced to resign?
Apparently, not one of those institutions gave Cullen a bad reference,
or told other hospitals he was trouble. It amounted to a policy of "see
no evil-speak no evil" – one that gave Cullen, in effect, a license to
kill. Correspondent Morley Safer reports. Cullen says he killed to
alleviate the pain and suffering of his victims. And if his confession
is accurate, it would make him one of the worst serial killers in U.S.
history.
In court, he seemed resigned to his fate: “Your honor, I don't wish to
be represented. I don't plan to contest the charges. I plan to plead
guilty."
So far, Cullen's offered no plea, and he's been formally charged with
just two murders -- one of them a patient at New Jersey's Somerset
Medical Center. Rev. Florian Gall was a 68-year-old priest admitted to
the hospital's critical care unit last June.
His sister, Lucille Gall, also a nurse, says she thought her brother
would recover. “He certainly wasn’t considered terminal,” she says. “We
had been advised by his doctors that he was doing better.”
But then, Lucille got an urgent call from her brother's doctor. “And
when I got to the hospital, which might have been maybe 20 (minutes) to
half-hour later, after the initial phone call, he was already blue, and
they were pumping on his chest,” recalls Gall. “And I asked them to
please stop, because I really thought it was God's will.”
And that's what she believed, until a detective showed up on her
doorstep four months later. He asked if she knew anything about her
brother's medications, including a powerful heart drug called digoxin.
“I knew my brother was on that. And then he told me that the day before,
his lab work for digoxin was normal. And on the day that he died, that
it was three times the amount,” says Gall, who believes her brother was
given a lethal dose of digoxin. “I had no question about that. When he
told me about that, I said, 'Well, somebody gave him something.'”
Somebody had. After prosecutors exhumed Rev. Gall's body, they confirmed
he had been killed by a digoxin overdose. And they already had records
showing Cullen had improperly ordered the drug at a rate that was
"medically alarming."
Cullen confessed to Gall's murder and told detectives he killed as many
as 14 other patients at Somerset. It was the last stop in a career that
could have been ended years earlier, according to John Morganelli -- one
of seven prosecutors investigating Cullen.
Cullen was found often violating nursing standards from the beginning of
his career. And he’s had problems at every institution in some fashion.
At his first job in 1987, at St. Barnabas Medical Center in New Jersey,
Cullen was reprimanded for contaminating an IV bag with insulin.
At Morristown Hospital, he was fired. At Warren Hospital, he was
investigated for a suspicious patient death. At Liberty Nursing Center,
he was fired for giving a patient medication without a doctor's order.
And at St. Luke's Hospital, he was suspended for stockpiling lethal
medications.
Apparently, none of this was reported to subsequent employers, as Cullen
moved from hospital to hospital -- all within a 40-mile radius.
“What it paints is a picture of a fellow that really was, at the very
minimal, not competent in his job. At the very worst was just, you know,
intentionally violating rules and procedures of hospitals. Setting aside
for the moment whether we can prove he actually ever killed anybody,”
says John Morganelli, who has charged Cullen with killing Otto Schramm
at Pennsylvania’s Easton Hospital in 1998.
Schramm's daughter, Kris Toth, recalls a strange encounter with a male
nurse who approached her father's bed, carrying a syringe: “He was a
nurse. He was dressed in white. And he wanted to take my father for some
test. And I asked what the needle was for, and he told me that was in
case my father's heart stopped.”
Two days later, she got a call from her father's doctor. Her father died
later that night. “He told me that somebody had given my father the
wrong medication,” recalls Toth, who is convinced Cullen killed her
father. “The wrong medication. Digoxin. My dad was not prescribed that
medication at all.”
Toth says she’d like to ask Easton Hospital how they could have hired
Cullen – with his past professional record. “When it comes to health
care, why wouldn’t these people care? Why wouldn’t they do something and
check into his background more, or find out why,” asks Toth. “All these
people are dead. If they would have stopped this man back in 1998, look
how many people would still be alive.” The fact is, hospitals hiring
Cullen knew little or nothing about his past -- partly because former
employers will not go into detail when called for a reference.
“Most employers today, if asked about a former employee, will not say
anything derogatory about that former employee. And the reason they
won't is because their lawyers will tell them not to,” says New Jersey’s
Attorney General Peter Harvey.
Harvey says hospitals are afraid they'll be sued if they give negative
references. And that culture of silence also hampers the state agencies
that license nurses. New Jersey's nursing board never received a single
complaint about Cullen about his nursing violations, his two suicide
attempts, or his conviction for breaking into a woman's apartment.
But what is the point of the nursing board if criminal investigations
are not reported to the board?
“The flaw lies in the statutory laws of the state. We have got to have a
law that imposes upon health care facilities the mandate of reporting to
the nursing board suspicious activity, certainly terminations where they
relate to an issue of patient care,” says Harvey, who oversees the
board. “That requirement exists for doctors. It does not exist for
nurses.” Without a law compelling them to report Cullen's behavior,
hospitals were able to just pass him along. Perhaps the most egregious
example occurred in 2002 at St. Luke's Hospital in Bethlehem, Pa., where
Cullen was accused of stashing dangerous medications, and was allowed
simply to resign.
A nurse who worked with Cullen says she told administrators he may have
used those drugs to kill people. But St. Luke's denies she came forward,
even though it was that nurse - not the hospital - who finally alerted
the police. They were unable to find sufficient evidence to charge
Cullen, and the Pennsylvania nursing board allowed him to keep his license.
“So you have to ask yourself, ‘What kind of conduct does it require in
order to revoke someone's license?’” asks Morganelli. “It has to be
pretty egregious because, based in their eyes, that wasn’t enough.”
While under investigation, Cullen was able to find a new job in New
Jersey, at Somerset Medical Center. The hospital says it was not made
aware that Cullen was under suspicion, but by last July, they noticed a
series of abnormalities in the blood work of four patients. Plus, Rev.
Gall had died of digoxin overdose.
Somerset's CEO is Dennis Miller.
“When Rev. Gall died and this was the second digoxin case and our team
of internal people couldn't determine what was causing this, certainly,
it went through my mind that possibly someone could be doing this
maliciously,” says Somerset’s CEO, Dennis Miller.
Somerset launched an internal investigation, and sought the advice of a
leading toxicologist, Dr. Steven Marcus, who told hospital officials
they probably had a criminal on their hands. But the hospital’s decided
to continue its investigation and not inform the police.
Marcus found Somerset's reluctance to call police troubling, and sent an
email to the state Department of Health: "…they told me they were not
planning on reporting these incidents to anyone, not the Department of
Health or the police, until after they mount a thorough investigation."
It wasn't until October of 2003, more than three months after Rev.
Gall's fatal overdose, that Somerset Medical Center finally notified police.
“I would suggest to you that you and I might've handled it differently
if we had gotten information from the same source at the same time,”
says State Attorney General Peter Harvey, who is coordinating the
investigation.
But Miller has no apologies, and believes the blame lies with that code
of silence that sent Cullen to his hospital, without a warning.
“The only information that we have available to us, as is with anybody,
is what people were willing to tell you and give you,” says Miller. “And
I think that is, from my point of view, sort of the tragedy in this
whole thing. People will not tell you that he's fired. People didn't
tell us he was fired. People won't tell you. That's the problem here.”
And what about Somerset's own silence? They never told Lucille Gall the
real cause of her brother's death.
“I don't know if it surprises me, because I have so many questions. I
have to believe that the nurses on the floor saw other things that were
going on, and probably reported it to their supervisor,” says Gall. “Do
I know that for sure? No. Does administration always do something about
it? I don't know.”
60 Minutes wanted to ask the Pennsylvania Nursing Board why they allowed
Charles Cullen to keep his license for so long. But neither they, nor
the nine facilities where Cullen worked prior to Somerset Medical
Center, would come on the broadcast.
Some of those hospitals, along with Somerset, are already facing
lawsuits. As for Cullen, he is negotiating a deal with prosecutors that
would require him to help authorities identify the patients he killed.
In exchange, he'd be spared the death penalty -- death by lethal injection.
©MMIV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.
It wouldn't that hard in most settings. It would be more suspicious in other settings but if someone is critical and they die it wouldn't be as suspect as in other areas. We just had a nurse fired from Tele in our hospital not for killing a patient but for stealing Lortabs guess she was getting them instead of the patient. Even with our medication dispensing machine (pyxis) if "waste" medication it depends on who witnesses the waste where it really went.
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