Ten Nurses Could Go to Jail - Because They Quit Their Jobs

[amykhar]

Nurses who quit face criminal charges / They are accused of endangering lives of terminally ill kids

In short, the nurses all quit at the same time without notice. Prosecutors are saying this put patients at risk.

What do you think? Is this something they should be prosecuted for?

Amy

[erik_kosberg]

Has the 13th Amendment been abolished?

[phoenixx]

No it is not something they should be prosecuted for. I think it would set a terrible labor law precedent that could be used to undo much of the improvements in working conditions in this century as well.

[jgibson2[$]]

It's hard to tell from the article exactly what happened. Criminal action against nurses is rare, even when a patient dies, so I don't think this will fly - especially since ALL of them were hired at other facilities fairly quickly and especially since the state board of nursing has apparently already cleared them.

There is one circumstance in which nurses can be prosecuted for quitting. You simply cannot walk out in the middle of a shift, unless you are too ill to walk. It's called patient abandonment and is quite a serious charge. You really can't walk out at the end of your shift if there is no one to replace you unless you are too exhausted or ill to continue.

Labor laws do apply to nurses hired on an hourly basis, but there are some necessary exceptions on a short-term basis. During the last blizzard here, the whole hospital nursing staff was put on mandatory OT at about 4pm on a Sunday afternoon and not released until Tuesday morning. It isn't as if you could actually go anywhere unless you lived within a couple of blocks of the hospital (and that was iffy), so they probably didn't really need to do that. It was to our benefit, though. I got paid for sleeping. Nurses on floors which weren't so well staffed got less sleep, but they did get to sleep. AND they got paid bonuses in addition to the OT.

When I was hired, I was informed that I am supposed to give the same number of weeks notice that I get of paid time off (3 weeks for me, 4-5 weeks for some nurses in other positions). They can't prosecute me for giving less notice, but it would be hard to come back. They would be unlikely to slander me if a potential new employer called them. People have won those lawsuits.

The article says that the trial was supposed to have started January 28. There is NO news after that date - makes no sense to me.

[hadassahchana[$]]

Quitting without giving notice by those responsible for high risk kids is just awful. If my child were there, I'd be devastated, and angry. Not only with the nurses, mostly with the administrator, but for heaven's sakes- you don't walk out on a bunch of really sick patients when nobody is there to take over. If they'd given notice and then walked if the hospital didn't find new nurses, that would be different. At least here, that would be just like going on strike - some types of nurses and ER docs cannot go on strike at all.

If they'd given notice, I'd support them 100%. When our obstetricians went on strike in Windsor, I organized a group of expectant moms who supported the docs in their grievance. They also gave the province a month notice, yet no action was taken. I ran prenatal clinics out of my home- at least my OB still wanted the women to have some minimal amount of care- but the point is, they fired warning shots. To me, that makes all the difference.

[theworm[$]]

I agree with Cindy on a moral level, but on a legal level I don't think this is prosecutable.

[jgibson2[$]]

More detail in this article

One of the complaints the nurses had was that they were "made to work as clerks initially" -- did they think they could walk in and work as RN's before they'd passed the US licensure exam? If so, someone lied to them. That wouldn't surprise me, but they should have done a little more research on their end. You cannot come to the US and start working as an RN until you are actually licensed in the US. That includes testing and a criminal background check. I don't know whether you can do any of that from outside the US.

We had a nurse working as a service aid (cleaning equipment and setting up admission areas for us) while she was getting cleared to work as an RN. My hospital had sponsored her, I don't know if she got RN pay for non-RN work, but I would bet that she wasn't told that she would be unless they intended to do that. She never once complained about "demeaning work" and did a really spectacular job. I'm sure she's doing equally well now that she is licensed in the US.

Switching them to different facilities, abusive supervisors, and non-payment of shift differential and OT would be enough to get most nurses to quit. Again, if they'd complained repeatedly about working conditions and threatened to quit if conditions did not improve, then they were within their rights to quit -- as long as they did not do it in the middle of a shift.

Keep in mind that bad working conditions for nurses usually equals unsafe conditions for patients. It sounds bad that they quit, but it called attention to what was probably an unsafe situation even if they stayed.

[realtraveller]

If you leave helpless terminally ill children alone, you've left them alone. Your working conditions were bad, what about them and the conditions you left those children in? Remember the nursing home patients who were abandoned during Hurricane Rita? Those owners were prosecuted. Anyone in charge of a child, can't just up and leave, no matter what the reason. Nurses, like doctors, have duties to their patients. The first of which is 'do no harm'. These nurses violated that duty. They should have done the mature thing and given two weeks notice so that the facility could have hired replacements and the children wouldn't have been endangered.

[jgibson2[$]]

Kathy,
I don't know why I'm bothering, because I'm fairly certain you didn't bother to read the links.

THEY DID NOT LEAVE THE CHILDREN ALONE. They quit while they were off duty.

[theworm[$]]

Unless there was something in their contracts that state that they can not quit without giving a certain amount of notice, there is no legal case here.
As Judy said, they didn't walk out in the middle of a shift. this was planned, and they did it to hurt the hospital, but they have the right to leave their jobs.
I'm glad that no patient suffered for it.

[amykhar]

This was on CNN today:

Video - Breaking News Videos from CNN.com

[realtraveller]

I did read the article. A spokesman for two of the parties said that the nurses 'got up and left' patients on ventilators. Earlier in the article it says that one of the nurses Ramos remained on duty, implying that the others had been on duty and left. The article is rather poorly written in that regard.

The CNN video is better and does say that only one nurse was on duty at the time of the mass resignation and only two were scheduled to show up the next day.

Whether it's criminal or not in those circumstances, is debatable. They could have known that the patients could be endangered by mass resignations. In any event, they didn't have the best interests of the patients in mind.

[mjfrombuffalo[$]]

Out of curiosity, what contingency plans do hospitals put in place for situations where they are faced with a sudden staff shortage? Judy says the immediate solution is to keep on-duty nurses from leaving, but that's not sustainable long-term; do hospitals have agreements with staffing agencies or the like to deal with situations like this?

[theworm[$]]

Kathy, when I read it, I thought that nurse Ramos worked 4 afters after her shift because the nurses that quit did not come in for theirs. It was poorly written, but I think that they quit off-duty and left the hospital in a pinch to get proper staffing. I don't think they walked out on patients.

[pippadaisy[$]]

I have a huge problem quitting without notice. Huge. There are tons of avenues for dealing with working conditions, from the State to OSHA to the DOL that don't involve leaving shifts uncovered for critically ill children. I was confused in the articles... were these PICU nurses or were the patient(s) on vents on a regular floor? If it was PICU I'm even MORE PO'd becuase those aren't jobs you can just move other nurses in from elsewhere in the hospital or from a service.

You may not be legally able to prosecute, but having been a parent of a child in the hospital? You bet your ass I'd be suing if my child was left with improper care. I have zero tolerance when it comes to taking care of sick kids and the attending and his little fellow who got their performance evaluation in the hallway at my top volume after four days of ignoring us and not even coming by during rounds, looking at Bug's chart, or otherwise doing anything for him other than billing our insurance can attest to that belief.

[realtraveller]

The prosecutor said in the CNN video that the endangerment charges are based on the fact that they all conspired to quit together. Neither of the articles say what percentage of the nursing staff, these 10 were for this facility. If they were a high percent of the nurses, then they knew that for all of them to quit together would put the patients at risk.

If any individual nurse just wanted a better job, she could have found a new job, given two weeks notice and moved on. No problem. These nurses, in order to vent anger or make some sort of point, decided to leave the patients vulnerable.

[erik_kosberg]

SF Chronicle story said

an indictment alleges the nurses knew their sudden resignations would make it difficult to find replacements.

It's always difficult to find nurses. This wasn't in some remote community with no other options for how to care for these kids; it's just a few miles outside of one of the biggest cities in the world.

realtraveller said

conspired to quit together

So they together agreed to do something legal. Unless quitting one's job is illegal, this "conspiracy" is as illegal as conspiring to bake cookies. There are no legal requirements to give notice before quitting a job. Employers want you to give two weeks notice. Doesn't mean you have to do so.

Myths of Sentosa/Avalon

They were not employees of the nursing homes where they worked but “agency nurses” employed by Sentosa Services to work as independent contractors at their assigned locations.

Nursing home contributions -- Newsday.com

Soon after Gov. Eliot Spitzer began to field repeated requests for a special prosecutor in the case against 10 Long Island nurses charged with endangering patients at a nursing home, that facility's owners started pouring thousands of dollars into the governor's campaign coffers.

Avalon Gardens Rehabilitation and Health Care Center in Smithtown and 13 other nursing homes in the SentosaCare network donated $15,000 to the Spitzer 2010 campaign fund on Dec. 20, according to disclosure reports filed in January.

[frazzledspice]

I agree that the nurses should have given notice. If they had given notice, and the employer discovered how hard they were to replace, the employer would have likely negotiated with them (or their representative) and resolved some of the conflicts they had.

More likely, when these nurses arrived from the Philippines, they probably didn't realize that nurses get much better salaries and benefits in hospitals than they do in nursing homes. The nurses I knew in NY who went back to work in nursing homes (after raising families) did so because they would have had to take too much continuing ed to get back into a hospital right away.....

Nursing homes are not the employers of choice. So, hey, once these nurses got the lay of the land and saw they could do better, they became dissatisfied and decided to go to hospitals (one was said to have gone to the university medical center hospital.)

And that's their right--if they give notice.

It's also possible that, as immigrants, the employer who sponsored them (the NH) made them sign a contract that they would stay a certain period of time (my son who is teaching in Asia had to sign a contract, in return for a visa, RT airfare, and other benefits. For his second year he found a much better job, but had to fulfill his first year contract first.)

[drmomentum[$]]

It was their right, period. Whether it was right may be a different question, but I'm pretty sure you have the right to quit.

[erik_kosberg]

theworm said

Unless there was something in their contracts that state that they can not quit without giving a certain amount of notice, there is no legal case here.

If there was something like that in their contract (which might or might not be legally binding anyway), that might open the door to a civil suit, but not to the criminal charges that prosecutors are going with.