Nursing Board Targets Calif. Nurses Disciplined in Other States
The state's Board of Registered Nursing recently found that about 3,500 California nurses have been cited for misconduct in other states and, in some cases, lost their licenses, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Officials estimate that as many as 2,000 of the nurses sanctioned in other states now will face disciplinary action in California. That figure is higher than the number of registered nurses cited by the state in the last four years combined.
The board's inquiry was conducted in response to a 2009 Times/ProPublica investigation that found hundreds of incidents where state nurses had been cited elsewhere for sexual abuse, neglect, rampant drug use and criminality, while maintaining their licenses to work in California.
Following the Times/ProPublica investigation, state officials compared a list of 376,000 active and inactive nurses in California against a database maintained by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing that includes nursing disciplinary actions recorded in most states.
The attorney general's office is developing teams of attorneys in Northern and Southern California to manage the additional disciplinary cases (Weber/Ornstein, Los Angeles Times, 6/28).
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