The Minnesota Board of Nursing took steps on Thursday to strengthen its oversight of problem nurses, voting to speed up its disciplinary process and to ask the Legislature for more authority to investigate and punish violations. Meeting for the first time since the Star Tribune began publishing stories about its record of disciplining nurses, the Nursing Board identified at least 13 ways it could get tougher on nurses who harm patients, steal drugs or commit crimes. Most of the discussion was focused on seeking new power, despite recent criticism from Gov. Mark Dayton that they are failing to use the authority they already have.
Lily Bush spends dozens of hours a week learning how to dispense medications, draw blood, dress wounds, become an expert in anatomy, deal with family members and the hundreds of other skills a registered nurse is supposed to master. There's always something more to learn and another chapter to study. For years, the demands of a nursing education also brought a reward. It was a recession-proof career, a lure for generations of students. "I knew going into school I was choosing a safe major, because all you heard is how badly hospitals needed nurses," said Bush, a junior at Indiana University School of Nursing.
A nurse died and four people were injured Tuesday in a stabbing attack at an East Texas medical complex. A 22-year-old man has been charged with murder in the stabbings, which happened around 7 a.m. Tuesday at the Ambulatory Surgical Center of Good Shepherd Medical Center in Longview. Gregg County Jail booking records show Kyron Rayshawn Templeton of Longview is also accused of four counts of aggravated assault. His bond has been set at $2.6 million. Jail records didn't list an attorney for Templeton. Officer Kristie Brian, a Longview police spokeswoman, said it's not yet clear what led to the attack.
Relaxing restrictions on what services nurse practitioners can and can't provide may lead to cost savings at retail health clinics, suggests a new study. Researchers found care related to retail health clinic visits cost $34 less in states that allowed nurse practitioners to prescribe and practice independently than in states that required them to be supervised by a doctor. "It appears there are cost savings when those nurse practitioners are allowed to operate autonomously in the retail clinic settings," Joanne Spetz told Reuters Health. Spetz is the study's lead author and a professor at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco.
Gov. Susana Martinez proposed Wednesday that New Mexico launch an advertising campaign to aggressively recruit nursing professionals from other states to help deal with a shortage of primary care providers. The governor plans to ask the Legislature to provide $220,000 next year for marketing directed at nurse practitioners to sell them on the advantages of New Mexico, which allows them more independence in providing medical care than many other states, including Texas. Nurse practitioners can operate their own clinics, don't have to work under the supervision of a physician, and have the authority to prescribe medications and refer patients to specialists.
Leslie Anderson had no reason to distrust the nurse she let into her home to care for her 4-year-old daughter, who requires around-the-clock medical attention for a rare disease that has left her a quadriplegic and unable to talk. Five months later, Anderson caught the nurse, Kelli Ingalls, stealing her daughter's pain medication. Anderson did not know until contacted by the Star Tribune that Ingalls had a drug history that included methamphetamine abuse and a county finding that Ingalls maltreated a child by allegedly operating a meth lab in her home.