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Nurse Lives Matter
So this just happened:
A nurse caring for a burn patient involved in a car crash in July refused to draw blood on her intubated, sedated patient for a police officer investigating the crash. Per hospital policy agreed upon with the Salt Lake City PD, patients must have a warrant for their arrest, be under arrest, or give consent in order to have blood drawn — this patient had none of the above.
When this nurse, with hospital administration on the phone, refused the blood draw the detective became unhinged. She was dragged out of the hospital and handcuffed for “interfering” in the investigation. U. of Utah and Public Safety officers were present at the time of the incident and did not intervene. After the arrest, the detective wonders aloud to another officer how this event will affect his off-duty job transporting patients for an ambulance company.
“I’ll bring them all the transients and take good patients elsewhere,” he says. The detective continues to be on duty for the police department while an internal investigation is conducted.
Y’all. Wow. I’m at a loss, truly. Healthcare professionals expect abuse from patients and the occasional administrator, but never police. There has long been an understanding between police officers and nurses, one of mutual respect. That’s how I’ve gotten out of ever getting a ticket. I realize this is an isolated incident, but it’s still terrifying to think that I could be arrested by some hothead officer for following hospital policy and advocating for my patient.
What makes it extra scary is the lack of intervention by hospital police. Working in the ED, I interact closely with our public safety officers and feel as though they support me 100 percent. I cannot imagine the guys I work with letting something like this happen, but who knows. I pray I’m never in the position to find out.
Any nurses out there ever experienced anything like this?
Nursing is one of the hardest professions I know of. We are verbally and physically abused by patients and their families; we are expected to provide flawless care with high patient ratios and often times little auxiliary support; we stand up to doctors when they enter incorrect orders or make poor decisions for our patients; we don’t have time to eat, pee, or complete the mountains of CYA charting we are expected to complete. It is a tough road to travel. If you know a nurse, tell them how much you appreciate all that they do to care for our society.
Published in General
I’m a lawyer and am constantly amazed at how low-level bureaucrats and a lot of police operate in total ignorance of their legal duties and the limits of their power. They simply do not expect pushback: what they do is annoying enough to be problematic, but not so bad that the occasional powerhouse will smack them down. They are used to bossing around overly busy parents, kids who don’t know their rights, and complacent housewives.
Ask me how I know this.
But if the police are asking for a blood sample over a month after the accident…
The process may not have had time to play itself out, VC.
I would hope, anyway, that “cops will be cops” isn’t allowed to stand as an excuse, because this is not how any of the cops I know roll. They would be ashamed of themselves, in fact.
As you said, cops, like doctors and nurses, are held to a higher standard than the rest of us. Sometimes (often!) the standard is downright unreasonably high, but in this case, at least from the evidence provided, there was only a low bar (“don’t manhandle a nurse”) to clear.
This.
By the way—the reason I’m a fan of body cameras (for all their difficulties and drawbacks) is two-fold. Most often, in my experience, it protects police officers from false accusations, and yes, these are extraordinarily common. (Bizarrely so, at least to someone like me who is perpetually astonished by the willingness of people to lie for no discernible reason at all.) But the other is that you do occasionally catch a police officer doing something rotten. He may not be a bad person in any ultimate sense, but bad, corrupt or brutal police work is a dreadful and dangerous phenomenon.
Incidentally, I think the question of why the University police officer and security guard didn’t intervene is interesting. You can hear them in the background trying to talk to him—should they have grabbed him and arrested him for false imprisonment?
University cops and security guards generally consider themselves to be lower int he pecking order than a detective from a city department. To be fair, there is often the presumption that the detective knows something they don’t know. And when one officer sees another officer screwing up, he is more likely to wait until the situation has been resolved than to risk a public confrontation between two cops and maybe more trauma and injury to the nurse?
Of course and my point is that there is an epidemic of this kind of wrong, it’s getting worse and it comes from a culture we’ve created. We can’t look at things just from a static moralistic view point of whether something is good or bad. The whole point of the video is that he was abusive so that is obvious. We have to deal with causes and effects, incentives and behaviors. That is our constant complaint about liberals. We have to do better. This abuse did not happen in a vacuum. The reasons matter and since our understanding of the WOD is so one dimensional I used this manifestation of it to make a point.
Nurses…nurses, do I know any nurses? If I find one, I’ll tell her and then give her a big ol’ hug.
It’s a long way from the Keys to Portland, but you probably have a bunch of frequent flyer miles. ;-)
Researcher extraordinaire, @1967mustangman, found another article that gives some more clarity on the events surrounding the patient. He was an off duty officer of some sort that was driving a semi-truck when he was hit by a man in a high speed chase attempting to evade arrest. The video was taken back in July (not recently like I thought) when the detective demanded access to the patient in order to draw the patient’s blood himself as part of a police phlebotomy program.
Why is the police officer at fault? According to the officer he was following the orders of the watch commander on duty that night.
Per article
Payne — who says he wanted the blood sample to protect the patient, not punish him — said he was advised by Lt. James Tracy, the watch commander on duty that night, to arrest Wubbels for interfering with a police investigation if she refused to let him get the sample, according to his report.
This is not a instance of a cop having a bad day. This was a cop following specific orders by his command. This is an instance of authority acting like authority. Just because you do not believe this is how authority acts does not make it not so.
I’m assuming you’re being sarcastic?
Not really. You guys want to write this down to a bad cop having a bad day. From my experience this is just how cops act. You do what they say, when they say it, the way they say it, or you get bounced around a bit for being stupid enough to question a cop. In the end the cop was following orders and other than a paid vacation, will have little or no ramification from this. He just did what cops do and in the end taught the nurse a lesson on why you comply with cops requests. Bet she will not do that again soon. The arrest on her record may even make it harder for her in the employment world in the future since who wants to hire a nurse with a record of not being helpful to police.
So after seeing this. Who would question a cops authority knowing that they will personally be arrested, bounced off a few things and have an arrest on their record? I suspect the number is few than it was before this became public. Which from authorities point of view is a good thing.
In that case we have a paramilitary organization making war against the people of the United States. It needs to be taken down.
That is truly horrifying. But, if you think nurses are mistreated now, just wait until they’re chained to a single-payer national healthcare system. Heaven forbid!
I know only a few “nice” cops. I know some too that just like beating people up, and are quite frank about it. I hope he goes to jail for assault, but that will never happen.
Except, Patrick, that it wasn’t the law. She had Hospital Policy in her hand. We all agree the cop was wrong, but she didn’t have any law on her side, and neither did he.
From the bit that we see, I can’t imagine the nurse facing any reprimand at all. She had administration on the phone to advise her. She explained the situation to the cop respectfully. I can’t see anything she did wrong. If she gets canned, I hope she wins enough in the wrongful termination suit to never have to work under these conditions again.
The video clearly shows an armed, unhinged man violently and illegally assault a nurse- period.
I don’t care what he has seen or experienced prior to his crime. He needs to be convicted and put in a cage.
Except she did. Legally he did not have the right to demand she draw blood, and he had no right to make any orders about her being in the room in the ER anymore than a Cop has a right to burst into your home and order you about. The Cop was in the wrong. Period. End of story. There is no excuse, no argument, no law that lets him bark orders, let alone lay hands on her when she did nothing wrong.
Cops who mess up, should be held to the same rules as the rest of us. Period.
I am having some trouble making sense of this statement. Why would the injured officer have to prove he was sober? If the arresting Detective wanted to prove his friend was sober, all he had to do was leave everything as it was. No blood was being allowed to be drawn. If one wished to make sure one’s friend was not proven to be intoxicated, not drawing blood would be exactly what one would want.
This is outrageous! I hate lawyers in general (sorry to my lawyer Ricochetti friends but you’ve brought that upon yourselves, for hundreds of years) but I fully support this woman suing this officer and the Salt Lake City PD, making it hurt in the pocket books is the only way to stop this level of bullying, since that’s what it was, bullying. This is EXACTLY the type of behavior that make honest law-abiding folks look at the police with a suspicious eye.
My son is currently in college with hopes of becoming a police office, he sincerely wants to protect the innocent from the bad guys. This video makes it pretty damn difficult to tell the difference.
Yes, my understanding is that no charges were brought against her and she was released after a bit while still on the hospital campus. The only way an arrest would go on her record is if charges were pressed. I can’t imagine that she will be fired for this as administration was clearly on her side.
Following up on Kate’s note (which I had to snip to stay in the comment word count limit), the video shows the police officer making a very rapid escalation from a difference of opinion on documented hospital / police interaction policy to a very hands-on and rough manhandling of a person who has given no indication whatsoever that she really needed to be physically restrained. Yes, she was refusing to comply with the police officer’s demand. But, there was no indication that physical restraint was imminently necessary. The police are not the only authority here. Even apart from the professional responsibility as a nurse, she has a responsibility to her employer – the hospital in whose building this is taking place. If she complied with the police officer’s demand, the hospital would have fired her and she’d be unemployable for being unwilling to follow hospital protocol. I also note that the police officer gave her almost zero time between confirming the hospital’s policy and his very rough arrest. No chance to consider her option of disobeying the police officer or disobeying her employer. The officer’s watch commander did demand (or at least approve) the demand for the blood draw. But, I haven’t seen or read that the watch commander demand that the officer immediately and violently arrest the nurse. That second decision appears to have been entirely the officer’s. The police officer’s beef is really with the hospital administration. He really should have marched up to the office of the hospital’s chief administrator and arrested the chief administrator.
The attorneys for the hospital should be all over this. I can’t imagine the hospital letting this guy get away with this. Nurses trust that the hospital will come to their defense in the event of wrongful doings such as this.
This. A millions times, this.
There is a second video from the other officers body-cam, it shows the anger on the arresting officers face. This guy has clearly lost control of his temper and took it out on this nurse, who was rightfully frightened and confused at this level of violence coming at her over a paper-work issue. There is no amount of “context” to justify what this man did.
This guy just gave cops across the country a black eye when they desperately need our support, nice job…
I didn’t quite understand the motivation as reported in the newspaper either. I commented though because some other commenters seemed to be assuming the unconscious patient was a suspect or perpetrator that the officer was trying to get.
I just keep thinking there must be something beyond what we see in the video, and maybe beyond what is in the newspaper story to explain 1) why the officer is adamant about getting a blood sample, and 2) why the officer went so quickly to a violent physical restraint of a nurse who was patiently explaining to him hospital policy. I still don’t get it.
So it’s OK for me to stick a needle in you and draw blood w/o your permission? No, that is a battery, an unpermitted touching. As far as I know every state has laws against that. There is an implied consent to touch the unconscious patient for treatment purposes. It does not imply she may touch him , invade his bodily integrity with a needle and draw blood at the request of a Police Officer who has no legal right to do so, or to require her to do so. Nor is she required to allow the PO access to her patient, absent the circumstances of him being under arrest or the officer having a warrant.
But the scenario presented in the comment was that the PO may have been trying to get the blood to prevent a perp from escaping justice. And the law does require consent, actual or implied, or a warrant, if the evidence is to be admissible in court.
Fixed it for you.
Very likely true Bryan. However, there seems to have been some dispute whether that was true or not and they both had competing orders*. On-scene is not the place to sort it out; IMO the police orders typically outrank in the moment. If the police were wrong then court and lawsuits are the places to sort it out.
Complicating this further, though, is that the officer overreacted in his handling of the situation even if he were ultimately correct in principle too. Throwing the nurse around like that is it’s own level of wrong with seemingly no context which would excuse it, not even an arrest attempt.
*In the thread there was some mention of a city phlebotomy program which might have been the consent needed – I don’t know anything, just possibilities to be fleshed out before we decide who is wrong egregious or not.