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

Something to absolutely not believe

Not every pension scam starts with a nurse in a wig, but this one did. A 57-year-old former nurse in Borgo Virgilio, Italy, allegedly showed up at a civil registry office dressed as his elderly mother to renew her ID so he could keep collecting her roughly €50,000 a year in pension and property income. An employee spotted the disguise and alerted authorities, and investigators later found his mother’s mummified remains at his home, believed to have been there since around 2022. Authorities think he may have used his medical knowledge to slow decomposition. This one is from late last year, but it’s too wild to let slide, and he now faces fraud, identity theft, and concealing-a-corpse charges.

Something to make you furious

Nurse.org dug into 2024 tax filings from 118 large nonprofit health systems, and the numbers are exactly as annoying as you’d expect. The median CEO took home about $4.93 million, 17 of them cleared $10 million, and the top earner, the NewYork-Presbyterian CEO, pulled in roughly $26.3 million. Meanwhile the median chief nursing officer earned about $846,000 and the median registered nurse about $93,600. Nurses have gone on strike at more than one in five of these systems, which probably isn’t a coincidence. Next time someone says there’s no money for safe staffing, remember where it went.

Something to make us nurses proud

Nurses just took a big step from the bedside to the ballot box. Mitchell Berman, an ER nurse in Wisconsin, flipped the state’s 1st District, and Kristina Knickerbocker, a family nurse practitioner and Air Force veteran, unseated a 12-term incumbent in Ohio’s 10th. Both campaigned on the health care costs they watched hit patients firsthand, with Berman saying he’s seen patients rationing their medication. They join a small group of House members with nursing credentials. Finally, someone in Washington who knows what a 12-hour shift feels like.

Something from a Subscriber

“Last winter I had a gentleman on my med-surg floor, 84 years old, who didn’t have a single visitor in the three weeks he was with us. Every night around 0300 he was wide awake, and every night I’d stop in for two minutes between call lights and ask about his day. Turns out he’d been a high school band director for 40 years, and by the end of the week I knew every kid who ever played first trumpet.

The night before discharge he asked me to hold out my hand and placed a worn little brass mouthpiece in it. ‘Every good section needs a leader,’ he said. I cried in the med room for a solid five minutes, then clipped it to my badge reel, where it still hangs. I got a gentle email about being 20 minutes late on my 0400 vitals that night. Worth it every time.”

— Dana R., Med-Surg RN, Ohio

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