Nurse’s Criminal Records

In Dallas, Texas a local television station has been running background checks on licensed nurses. They have found “thousands of nurses with arrest records.” That much didn’t surprise me – but the arrests include murder, kidnapping and arson.

What? Murder?

My immediate thought was, don’t employers do background checks? My second thought was, are these nurses currently employed?

Turns out that the Texas Board of Nursing “wanted to run background checks of all nurses in 2005” but the state didn’t allow the funding at that time. When they finally got the money to do it, they didn’t have enough staff to do it – short staffed at the Board of Nursing.

At any rate, it seems to me that even if the state Board didn’t check, surely employers do – But I certainly wouldn’t assume that. There is a lot of talk out there about a shortage of nurses,but stories like this only confirm my suspicion that it’s more than that – its a shortage of qualified and trustworthy nurses. Imagine if your loved one was being taken care of by a murderer . . . Unacceptable.