Tri-City Hospital board member Charlene Anderson's nursing license: revoked/stayed/probation

John Graham:
While I agree with her probation and stayed revocation for what she did, I don't think Charlene Anderson should be a member of the Board until she has successfully completed her probation. Nurses are held to a very high standard and members of the State Board of Registered Nursing should be even more squeaky clean. It is not fair to the thousands of of other nurses who somehow find the time to get their charting properly done even when they are busy or understaffed. If she is as wonderful a nurse as many have commented, then she needs to do the right thing and resign from the Board in order avoid the appearance of corruption and double standard for members of the governing Board in her profession. I have seen many fine nurses in this state fired or had their licenses revoked for much less.


"...The state nursing board voted Thursday to accept the recommendation of an administrative judge to revoke her license, then stay the revocation and place her on probation... The board hands down stayed revocations to about 100 of the state’s 390,000 registered nurses each year.

"Anderson’s “failure to document the disposition of narcotics is a very serious matter,” Walker wrote. “'If she did not administer the medications to patients, she created a potential for harm by depriving them of prescribed medications. If she did administer the medications to patients, she created a potential for harm by creating a risk for over-medication.'”


Tri-City official gets probation as nurse
Three-year penalty stems from undocumented drugs
Aaron Burgin
SDUT
Nov. 18, 2011

The state Board of Registered Nursing has put Tri-City Healthcare District board member Charlene Anderson on three years probation for failing to account for prescription painkillers while she worked at Scripps Memorial Hospital in Encinitas in 2006.

Anderson, who was elected to the Tri-City board in 2008, was accused of failure to account for 23 Percocet tablets, seven Vicodin tablets and three tablets of Tylenol with codeine removed from a hospital dispensing machine from May to August of that year. Scripps fired Anderson a month later.

Anderson, 61, expressed regret for the incident in a prepared statement and said she would not step down from the board.

“I regret my apparent lack of complete documentation five years ago at Scripps when after correctly removing medications ... and correctly administering them to the patients, I apparently did not complete documentations on the chart in some cases,” she said. “My patients were not and have not ever been harmed and my nursing practice has been enhanced by this negative experience.

“Am I going to resign? Absolutely not. I did nothing wrong that affects my tenure on the Tri-City board,” she said.

The state nursing board voted Thursday to accept the recommendation of an administrative judge to revoke her license, then stay the revocation and place her on probation.

That action is one step short of outright revocation, said a spokesman with the state Department of Consumer Affairs, which oversees the nursing board. The board hands down stayed revocations to about 100 of the state’s 390,000 registered nurses each year.

The judge in the proceeding, Robert Walker, said that while Anderson’s actions were very serious, there was no evidence that patients were harmed by her actions. He noted that she had a nearly complaint-free record in her 20 years as a registered nurse.

Walker also noted that Anderson was not accused of taking the drugs or failing to give them to patients — just not properly charting them. [Maura Larkins comment: It would be next to impossible to find out what happened to those pills. The state didn't find Anderson innocent of consuming the drugs; it just couldn't prove anything, so it didn't charge her. “If she did not administer the medications to patients, she created a potential for harm by depriving them of prescribed medications. If she did administer the medications to patients, she created a potential for harm by creating a risk for over-medication...On the other hand, there is no evidence that (Anderson) actually harmed any patient,” Walker wrote.]

Anderson’s “failure to document the disposition of narcotics is a very serious matter,” Walker wrote. “If she did not administer the medications to patients, she created a potential for harm by depriving them of prescribed medications. If she did administer the medications to patients, she created a potential for harm by creating a risk for over-medication.”

“On the other hand, there is no evidence that (Anderson) actually harmed any patient,” Walker wrote. [Maura Larkins comment: Whew! Both Charlene and her patients were lucky that no harm occurred.]

Walker denied the state’s request to recover $46,456 from Anderson as restitution for investigation costs. The judge said the state did not properly substantiate its costs.

The State Attorney General’s office filed the administrative complaint against Anderson in January 2010, four years after the incidents occurred.

A four-day administrative hearing akin to a criminal trial was held in July. Anderson’s attorney argued that she wasn’t able to chart the medication because the hospital’s postpartum unit, where Anderson worked, was too busy and understaffed.

State authorities alleged that understaffing was not an excuse.

As part of her probation, Anderson must submit to mental health and psychiatric testing after Walker expressed concern that Anderson knew the rules and still failed to abide by them.

“Is there a medical problem that caused her to forget to do things she intended to do?” Walker wrote. “Because the evidence suggests these concerns, protection of the public requires that there be a professional assessment of the respondent’s ability to practice safely.”..

Problem nurses stay on the job as patients suffer

Problem nurses stay on the job as patients suffer

By Charles Ornstein, Tracy Weber and Maloy Moore
July 12, 2009


Nurse Owen Jay Murphy Jr. twisted the jaw of one patient until he screamed.

He picked up another one -- an elderly, frail man -- by the shoulders, slammed him against a mattress and barked, "I said, 'Stay in bed.' "

He ignored the alarms on vital-sign monitors in the emergency room, shouted at co-workers and once hurled a thirsty patient's water jug against the wall, yelling, "How do you like your water now?" according to state records.

Murphy's fellow nurses at Kaiser Permanente Riverside Medical Center finally pleaded with their bosses for help. "They were afraid of him," a hospital spokesman said.

Under pressure, Murphy resigned in May 2005. Within days, Kaiser alerted California's Board of Registered Nursing: This nurse is dangerous.

Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein, both former Los Angeles Times staff writers, did significant reporting for this article before leaving The Times last year and have continued to cover the issue for ProPublica.

Maloy Moore is a Times researcher. Doug Smith, The Times’ director of database reporting, contributed to this report.
But the board didn't stop Murphy from working elsewhere, nor did it take steps over the next two years to warn potential employers of the complaints against him. In the meantime, Murphy was accused of assaulting patients at two nearby hospitals, leading to convictions for battery and inflicting pain, board and court records show.

Even Murphy, who has since taken classes to curb his anger, was surprised the board didn't step in earlier.

"The nursing board is there to protect the public from me," he said in an interview.

The board charged with overseeing California's 350,000 registered nurses often takes years to act on complaints of egregious misconduct, leaving nurses accused of wrongdoing free to practice without restrictions, an investigation by The Times and the nonprofit news organization ProPublica found.

It's a high-stakes gamble that no one will be hurt as nurses with histories of drug abuse, negligence, violence and incompetence continue to provide care across the state. While the inquiries drag on, many nurses maintain spotless records. New employers and patients have no way of knowing the risks.

Reporters examined the case of every nurse who faced disciplinary action from 2002 to 2008 -- more than 2,000 cases in all -- as well as hundreds of pages of court, personnel and regulatory reports. They interviewed scores of nurses, patients, families, hospital officials, regulators and experts.

Among the findings:

* The board took more than three years, on average, to investigate and discipline errant nurses, according to its own statistics. In at least six other large states, the process typically takes a year or less.

"It's really discouraging that when you do report people . . . they don't take action," said Joan Jessop, a retired chief nursing officer in Los Angeles who filed multiple complaints with the board during her 43-year career. "What is so frightening to me is that these people will go on and do it to somebody else."

* The board failed to act against nurses whose misconduct already had been thoroughly documented and sanctioned by others. Reporters identified more than 120 nurses who were suspended or fired by employers , disciplined by another California licensing board or restricted from practice by other states -- yet have blemish-free records with the nursing board.

* The board gave probation to hundreds of nurses -- ordering monitoring and work restrictions -- then failed to crack down as many landed in trouble again and again. One nurse given probation in 2005 missed 38 drug screens, tested positive for alcohol five times and was fired from a job before the board revoked his probation three years later.

* The board failed to use its authority to immediately stop potentially dangerous nurses from practicing. It obtained emergency suspensions of nurses' licenses just 29 times from 2002 to 2007. In contrast, Florida's nursing regulators, which oversee 40% fewer nurses, take such action more than 70 times each year.

In interviews last week, the board's leaders and other state officials defended its record. "We take what we do -- protecting the public -- very, very seriously," said Executive Officer Ruth Ann Terry.

Terry, at the helm for nearly 16 years and on staff for 25, acknowledged that the pace of the disciplinary process has "always been unacceptable" and said the system was being streamlined. But she blamed other parts of the state bureaucracy for delays and was vague about what changes would be made...

This report, one in a series of occasional articles about oversight of nurses, was prepared in collaboration with ProPublica, an independent investigative newsroom in New York.