Employment Screening - How Doctors and Nurses Get Away with Murder

We count on hospitals and medical organizations to have some of the best hiring and employment screening processes in the country. For the most part, they are on top of things and are able to weed out the “bad seeds” that shouldn’t be caring for us and our loved ones. However, with several loopholes in the internal and external reporting systems, some people still slip through the cracks. When this happens, it can reap deadly results for patients. Several cases in recent years have highlighted the importance of catching resume lies and accessing the true facts about someone’s past. No matter if they are an orderly, nurse, or doctor, anyone in a capacity who is able to access patients or medications needs to be fully screened and pre-qualified before they are allowed to step into a medical facility.

The first case that comes to mind is that of Dr. Michael Swango, aka “00 Swango, License to Kill”, as he was called by his friends in medical school. He was caught providing fake gynecological exams at his medical school and was almost expelled for it. The school made no note in his permanent record and allowed him to graduate. His next stint was for 1 year at Ohio State University where nurses noticed that seemingly healthy patients were suddenly dying under his care. One nurse actually saw him injecting something into a patient who later became mysteriously sick. The nurses told hospital administrators about their suspicions, but their accusations were dismissed after a very shallow investigation. Swango was employed in 1984 as an EMT where dozens of his co-workers were becoming violently ill any time Swango brought food or drinks to work for everyone. It was reported to the police and they found that he had arsenic and other deadly substances on him. He was subsequently convicted in Illinois on a charge of aggravated battery for poisoning his fellow EMTs and went to jail for 5 years. After his release, he simply told a few resume lies and was able to get employed at several other institutions where he killed dozens of patients before being caught and arrested for multiple murder-in-the-first-degree charges.

Even an orderly can have enough access to patients to kill them by the droves. In the case of Donald Harvey, aka “The Angel of Death”, he is purported as saying that he was doing his patients a favor by suffocating them or injecting them with deadly poisons to save them from the agony of their illnesses. This was not true, however, because he poisoned people in his personal life for the purposes of causing them physical harm in order to get back at them for wronging him or his loved ones. He was suspected of killing and harming patients long before his arrest in 1987, however. Nurses and other staff made a connection to patient deaths and illnesses, but nothing was formally reported to hospital administration for further investigation and he was allowed to continue his killing spree.

The key here is employment screening that covers more than just what’s happened in the state in which the person is applying for employment. There are 2 national reporting databases where criminal and disciplinary action can be reported and caught prior to hiring an individual. However, there really is no good way to catch out-of-state crimes, such as in the case of Dr. Swango’s 5-year sentence. We must then rely on: people not telling resume lies, hospital staff calling past places of employment for performance information, reporting (and documenting) suspicious behavior seen by hospital staff, and counting on more comprehensive employment screening databases that will catch these activities head-on.