Inside sources within Asante have since disclosed details surrounding the reported deaths, per NBC5 News. It is alleged that up to 10 patients died of infections contracted at the hospital.
The sources claim the infections were caused by a nurse who purportedly substituted medication with tap water.
It is alleged that the nurse was attempting to conceal the misuse of the hospital’s pain medication supply — specifically fentanyl — and intensive care unit patients were injected with tap water, causing infections that resulted in fatalities.
Medford police have confirmed their active investigation into the situation at the hospital but have refrained from providing specific details.
The sources indicate that the unsterile tap water led to pseudomonas, a dangerous infection, especially for individuals in poor health, commonly found in a hospital’s ICU.
Okay. A lot to unpack here. You’re right that nurses can go to a different facility to work, but not nearly as easily or quickly as they can move staffing agencies in the current climate. At this point, you can pretty much just call a new agency and say that you can start tomorrow, and somebody will make that happen for you.
I want a preface but I’m about to say by saying that I do ultimately like the idea of unions, but it’s just as dangerous to say that they’re evil as it is to say that they are perfectly, and infallibly good. A union is simply a group of people uniting for collective benefit. One person cannot be a Union. What would they be uniting with? The power of a union is in their numbers.
With regard to the last point, I think you need to look up what hearsay is. I literally heard the guy say it over the phone with my own ears. The short version of the story is that one of his guys was a truck driver who got impatient and chose to drive a fully loaded semi around a closed railroad crossing and got hit by a train causing, what he kept referring to as around a million dollars in damage. Obviously his supervisor tried to fire him on the spot. It’s miraculous that no one died, and I don’t want a truck driver like that on the road where me and my family drive, but he used the threat of collective action to get the guy his job back because, in his words, "he has had no other disciplinary action in the last 5 years that he’s worked there ". In my humble opinion, when your actions cause you to be not only a poorly performing employee, but actually in danger public safety with your actions, I think that is a valid termination, but the union wouldn’t let it happen.
Police unions are the most guilty of this. You can read all the time about cops who get put on 30 days of paid leave after they beat the shit out of a handcuffed black guy during a traffic stop or something.
I was being hyperbolic; I thought that would be obvious.
You and I must work in very different current climates.
You didn’t personally experience that anecdote (and it’s also just an anecdote). Show me a NURSING union that protects people who are dangers to that level. We don’t because it’s not our professional culture, so it’s not how we run our unions. The president of the Massachusetts Nurses Association is still a practicing nurse. She has no personal or professional interest in protecting nurses who are genuinely dangerous.
I also have 20 years experience in management prior to becoming a nurse, including quality, safety and accident investigation experience. One accident doesn’t prove that an employee is bad, no matter how much damage it cost. Systemic errors exist. Was that guy being impatient because management was on his ass to do more and more with less and less support? Holding him to an impossible schedule like they do the rail workers? How was he able to have his truck in a situation like that in the first place? Did he bypass safety signalling/communication, or did the signaling/communication policies not exist in the first place? If that driver was genuinely a dangerous employee and had no prior disciplinary action, then that’s a management failure to document concerning actions in the past. None of that has anything to do with the union and the union was right to stick to the letter of the contract.
And policing needs to be reformed top to bottom. Union protection alone is not sufficient to create the culture of abusive power that exists in modern policing. That requires the full complicity of our legislative and judicial branches. (See: “tough on crime” politicians and SCOTUS shielding cops from accountability and responsibility.)