Criminal Nurse Story?!

I've decided to do some research on criminal nurses. Face it, there are bad people in almost every profession. Even nurses! So I found a couple stories to share with you.

Hurricane Katrina shocked the nation, as we witnessed a new level of disaster and tragedy, and post-Katrina recovery was slow going and equally horrifying. But even more shocking were the murders of elderly patients.

Dr. Anna Pou and two nurses, Chery Landry and Lori Budo, were arrested based on accusations of intentionally giving four older patients lethal doses of morphine and Versed, a sedative. According to an affidavit, Pou told a nurse to inject “lethal doses” to the patients who couldn’t be evacuated from Memorial Medical Center three days after Katrina hit. Pou said that the patients were not likely to survive anyway.

In February 2009, two Wisconsin nurses were fired from posting pictures of a patient on Facebook taken on a cell phone.

An anonymous call from a Mercy Walworth Medical Center employee tipped police off about the online pictures. Investigators discovered that the photos were taken when the patient was admitted to the ER due to a sex device in his rectum. However, the police haven’t found anyone who actually saw the pictures on Facebook, but said a discussion post of the situation was on one of the nurse’s profile.

A 47-year-old nurse, Barbara Salisbury, was arrested on murder charges in 2004. Salisbury, a ward sister at Leighton Hospital in Crewe, Cheshire, was accused of attempting to kill four elderly patients.

The patients, Reuben Thompson, 81, Frank Owen, 92, James Byrne, 76, and Frances May Taylor, 88 were allegedly killed between 1999 and 2001. Each patient was killed in a different way, including being given the wrong dosage amounts and being deprived of oxygen.

Although Salisbury denied the charges, she was found guilty of two counts of attempted murder for Taylor and Own, and sentenced to five years in prison. The court was told that she was motivated by a need to free up beds on the ward. Salisbury was found not guilty in the deaths of Byrne and Thompson. Additionally, the Nursing and Midwifery Council found her guilty of two misconduct counts and removed her name from the nursing registry.

Not all nurses are bad. But not all nurses are good.