On Monday, August 24, 2015, the California Nurses Association (CNA) held yet one more of their dog and pony shows. This time the subject of their display was the firing of two Huntington Memorial Hospital RN’s.   The nurses, Allysha Almada (CA RN License #802190) and Vicki Lin (RN License #832090), claim that they were fired by Huntington administration for being vocal about their support for a nursing union, a union that if the nurses voted in favor of (which they didn’t) would have been represented by the CNA. Want to check an RN’s license all you have to do is go to the California Board of Registered Nursing (BRN) website here – http://www.rn.ca.gov/online_services/perm-verif.shtml and click the big grey button marked “click to verify a license” and you can check not only if a RN is licensed but pretty much any health/medical profession that is licensed in our state.

Depending on which newspaper you read somewhere between two dozen to 50 nurses/people came out in support of the reinstatement of Almada and Lin. However, if my many years of experience (all up and down the nursing career ladder) has taught me anything, its that sometimes there’s more to the story than what meets the eye – and that would appear to be the case with Almada and Lin.

I’ve learned that at least one complaint has been filed against Almada and Lin. The complaint has been sent to the BRN, the licensing body in our state that has oversight of nearly 400,000 licensed RNs and is responsible for investigating allegations of misdeeds, accusations, etc., lodged against a California RN. So, what pray tell could the complaint be – well it’s not about Almada and Lin’s support of a nursing union for darn sure!

The complaint alleges the following:

• Nurse Almada provided her username and password to Nurse Lin
• Nurse Almada provided this in the form of a note, which was later found in a patient’s medical record, and perhaps the most serious of charges
• Nurse Almada did this so that Nurse Lin could use Nurse Almada’s username and password to confirm as a second “signatory” that Nurse Almada had double-checked a medication that required two nurses to check-off, without Nurse Almada actually being present and having actually verified that she had indeed confirmed that the appropriate amount of medication had been titrated/drawn by Nurse Lin.

If indeed, Nurse Almada did as alleged and Nurse Lin “signed” as Nurse Almada as alleged in the complaint then it would appear to this nurse that they clearly violated our nurse practice act, not to mention potentially placing a patient in harms way – because the medication that was being administered could be deadly – which is why our nursing protocols call for the first nurse to draw the medication and check that the amount is appropriate and for a second nurse to come and verify that indeed the medication is the appropriate medication and that the appropriate amount is about to be administered. Remember the “rights” — the right patient, at the right time, and so forth.

What’s the big deal about requiring two or more nurses to verify that the appropriate medication is about to be administered to a patient, simple some of the medications that a nurse administers can KILL their patient and nurses are only human and can make a calculation error, inadvertently draw too much medication, misread an order and so forth, so nursing protocols require that certain medications such as insulin, heparin and others require a two nurse protocol. Because too much insulin can kill and too much heparin and your patient can bleed out of every orifice of their body. So the two-nurse protocol protects both patient and nurse and to circumvent this safety protocol is unconscionable.

The question that now begs to be asked is how come the CNA is demanding the reinstatement of two nurses that allegedly engaged in acts of what would appear to be not only the falsification of a medical record and the possibility that these two nurses engaged in an act of patient endangerment? I guess, when the rubber hits the road patient safety isn’t what concerns them as much as holding press conferences that continue to spread their propaganda and accuse Huntington Memorial Hospital of being a “bad” hospital that’s mean to its RNs on staff.