June 29, 2010

The California Office of the Attorney General is preparing two teams of lawyers in Northern and Southern California to process an estimated 2,000 cases of nurses who have been cited for misconduct in other states, yet still hold valid licenses in California.

The California Board of Registered Nursing has come under fire resulting from a 2009 investigation by the Los Angeles Times and ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization, which revealed hundreds of California nurses had been sanctioned in other states for sexual abuse, neglect, drug use and other misconduct, but still held their California nurses licenses.

As a result, the California Board of Registered Nursing ran its list of active and inactive nurses through the database of the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, to which most states report disciplinary actions. The data showed that some sort of disciplinary action has been taken in other states against 3,500 nurses holding California licenses, said Russ Heimerich, a spokesman for the California Department of Consumer Affairs, which oversees the California Board of Registered Nursing.

“We estimate that 60 percent of the 3,500 [roughly 2,000] nurses will likely have to have some sort of action taken against their [California] license.” Heimerich said. He said that’s based on a cursory review by enforcement staff. Not all of the actions taken against licenses reported by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing are disciplinary actions. For instance some states revoke nurses’ licenses when they retire.

“We are triaging the 2,000 to determine who poses the most danger,” Heimerich said.

Theoretically nurses holding California licenses who have been disciplined in other states could return here to work while their case is pending. But Heimerich said now the California Board of Registered Nursing has their names flagged and he added, hospitals usually check the National Council of State Boards of Nursing database for disciplinary actions before hiring nurses.

California is not a member of that Council and has not used that database for regular checks of disciplinary actions against California nurses in the past. The state board has been checking all nursing applicants against that database for more than a decade and will now start checking practicing nurses on at least a quarterly basis, Heimerich said.

Because the estimated 2,000 cases involve actions already taken in other states, the workload will consist mainly of requesting records from those states and processing them here. The Nurses Board will file the accusations and there will be due process in which the accused has the opportunity to file a notice of defense, Heimerich said. He said the board expects the cases to be processed in a few months.

The 2009 investigation by the Los Angeles Times and ProPublica prompted Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to remove three of the six board members of the state Board of Registered Nursing. The Department of Consumer Affairs also has created the Consumer Protection Enforcement Initiative with the goal of processing disciplinary actions in an average of 12 to 18 months. Previously it was taking three years in some cases, Heimerich said.

And the state nursing board should be getting additional resources. Currently included in the state budget proposal is funding for another 140 positions for the state’s 18 healing arts boards as well as funding for a new database that is more standardized and should make it easier for searching and tracking of cases, Heimerich said.