Coincidentally, I tripped across a news report from PM – a program of Australian public broadcasting. The report aired April 21st and consists of an interview with John Field, who has completed a study about nurses who kill patients:
PM – Study investigates serial killer nurses
PM – Monday, 21 April , 2008 18:36:00
Reporter: Nance Haxton
LISA MILLAR: It’s enough to give you a phobia about going to hospital.
A University of Adelaide PhD study has examined why some nurses deliberately kill their patients and what hospitals should do to prevent the murders.
Barrister and registered nurse, John Field, looked into 48 cases of nurses murdering their patients around the world and found that 38 of those were serial killers.
John Field spoke to Nance Haxton in Adelaide.
JOHN FIELD: The most common method of murdering was by lethal injection. It became obvious to me that murder of a patient by nurses can happen anywhere, but I think that the nurses who do murder patients, particularly the serial killers, would be serial killers whether they were nurses or anything else for that matter, you know, any profession. (emphasis added)
This is relevant to two recent blog entries (April 9th and April 10th) regarding the suspicious deaths at the Woodstock Residence nursing home here in Illinois. As described, the press coverage has gone through some “interesting” permutations starting with the investigation right up through the criminal indictments of two nurses who used to work at the facility. It’s important to note, though, that the nurses in the Woodstock case haven’t been charged with manslaughter or homicide.
More from Field here:
JOHN FIELD: I think what we can learn is that nurses themselves need to have a heightened awareness of it. They have to at least at first accept the possibility that this could happen.
And what I found was during the whole time I was doing this study, when nurses would ask me what I was doing my PhD on and I’d say, “Nurses that murder their patients”. And they’d say, “Oh, you mean euthanasia, you know, putting people out of their misery”.
And I’d say, “No, I mean people who are murdering their patients, that are actually doing it with malice and forethought, that are intentionally killing them for no good reason and sometimes when they’re healthy.” And they’d be astonished. They couldn’t believe that a nurse would do such a thing.
And I think that’s part of the problem is that it’s so hard to contemplate that that would be the case, it’s such a foreign concept that it would be almost impossible to suspect your colleague of doing that.
NANCE HAXTON: And you found that even in the response of some hospitals in these cases that quite often they simply moved that nurse on if there were some
suspicions, which only opened up the possibility of them doing it somewhere else.JOHN FIELD: That’s right. Now the practice of permitting people who were suspected or considered to be possibly be killing patients, just moving them on,
probably isn’t a satisfactory way of dealing with it. And the fact that those people then went on to have long killing careers, sometimes 16 or more years, suggests that’s a very poor practice.
Field’s findings resonate with the comments of other professionals who have studied this phenomenon. You’ll find them quoted in this 2003 article from USA Today I linked in an earlier entry.
I’m happy to say that Field’s thesis is available online.
I’ll find this handy the next time multiple suspicious deaths at a nursing home or hospital are described as “mercy killings” by the police, prosecutors or the press. –Stephen Drake