Hello fellow Nurse, this is your weekly handoff. Some quick and dirty nursing news that’s worth sharing. Enjoy!

Something’s going to change for nursing homes

Biden is tuning his focus towards setting standards for nursing homes. While he says that this new federal standard is to protect senior lives, I have to wonder if it isn’t because he wants nursing homes to be shaped up incase he shortly enters one himself… The concept sounds great in theory- mandating safe staffing for nursing homes funded by Medicare and Medicaid. However in practice it is going to cause some uproar. Some of the changes could include requiring and RN to be on staff 24/7 and residents to have 3 hours of direct care a day. This means that 75% of nursing homes (that are already chronically short staffed as is) would have to hire more staff. With this requirement will there come additional funding? Will this make nursing home care even more expensive for consumers? When researching this article a plethora of additional angry articles are populating across the country with complaints of how detrimental this could be (I included one from Alabama). What do you think- How do we solve the nursing home crisis?

Something to “C”

Cora Weberg, a Washington RN, was initially arrested in May 2018 after being suspected of stealing narcotics (The article notes she was arrested near the Canadian border… Was she fleeing?? I want more info on that). However, the story has gotten more interesting, and I’m guessing contributed to the length of time- 5 years- that it took for her to be charged. Weberg was found to have used needles on herself to administer narcotics and then used those same needles on patients. Causing at least 12 known cases of Hep C in the patients she had treated. The CDC and Washington Department of Health got involved and found her to be “the likely source” of the infections. I assume that “likely” wasn’t enough to make any sort of direct charge related to this so she was charged with tampering with consumer products. She pled guilty and will now face up to 10 years in prison, a maximum fine of 250,000, and five years of probation.

Something to lose your license over

You know I love a good nursing arrest story… So here is another bad nursing story. We leave Washington for Kentucky where a nurse, Abigail Hall, was arrested after being pulled over a failing the sobriety test. Apparently, before driving away, she was seen entering a nursing home bathroom and when she left the top of a morphine bottle was found by another nurse (who apparently didn’t do anything until after the fact?). Hall was found to have “administered” morphine to three patients at the nursing facility that day. What’s even more wild is she admitted to stealing patients’ pain medications since January- she had been replacing the morphine with water and food coloring!! I can only imagine the number of patients that likely suffered in pain due to this trick. Her admitting to all of this has since earned her way more than a DUI- possession of a controlled substance and tampering with physical evidence being among them. I truly hope that she gets the help she needs… and never works as a nurse again.

Something from a Subscriber

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