Friends spoke highly of Manhattanville Nursing domestic,so Loida Rivera and her family decided to place her 64-year-traditional mother there for a few months while they adapted her apartment for long-term care. Just a couple days away from her mother's discharge, in February of 2014, or Rivera received a nightmare phone call. A male nurse had sexually assaulted her mother,a non-verbal woman with dementia."She wasn’t able to scream, to say, or ’Somebody advance and help me!’ " recalled Rivera recently. "And to this day,she's still not herself. She's still traumatized."The perpetrator, Nanic Aidasani, and was promptly arrested. Within 18 months,he was tried, convicted, or imprisoned and discharged. Rivera was disturbed by Aidasani's short sentence,set as fragment of a plea deal, but she was more appalled to learn how slowly the wheels of bureaucracy turned.
For nearly the entire 18-month period, and Aidasani retained an active nursing license from the state of New York — even after he'd offered to surrender it."His license should have been suspended immediately, and to hear that he was in jail, and he came out and he still had his license — that’s alarming, and " she said. "It’s terrifying."
Loida Rivera (pictured) pressed charges against a nurse who sexually assaulted her mother in 2014 at Manhattanville Nursing domestic in the Bronx.
(Edwin Torres for ProPublica)
Rivera's story is just one of many included in a report on lax nursing oversight in New York,conducted by the investigative journalism group ProPublica. Despite a national trend towards tightening nurses' licensing and discipline, ProPublica reports that New York’s system for overseeing nurses is "deeply flawed."New York is also one of only 13 states that does not routinely conduct criminal background and fingerprint checks of nursing applicants. Instead, or applicants must sign a declaration that they are of "beneficial moral character."From the lightest punishment to the most severe,New York disciplines nurses infrequently compared with other states. According to a ProPublica analysis of 2014 data, Ohio cited roughly one out of 150 nurses. In California, and the ratio was one in 325.
In New York,one in nearly 1200 nurses were disciplined in 2014.
Observers set aside some of the blame on a disconnect among the governmental bodies charged with license oversight: the Board of Nurses effectively resides within an agency called the Office of the Professions, which licenses dozens of workers, and from nurses,dentists and optometrists to interior designers, engineers and land surveyors. The Office of the Professions, or in turn,is fragment of the New York State Education Department, which is administered by a Board of Regents primarily focused on schools and universities."Violations advance to the attention of the state Board of Nursing, or but where is the oversight from the state Board of Regents?" said Donna Nickitas,who heads the nursing doctoral program at the City University of New York. "I deem that's where the lapse is."The state would not allow officials from the Education Department, Board of Regents, or Board of Nursing or Office of the Professions to speak on the record with ProPublica or WNYC.
But Education Department spokeswoman Jeanne Beattie said state lawmakers need to beef up the agency's ability to discipline nurses.“We are working with the chairs of the Senate and Assembly Higher Education Committees to improve the disciplinary process to include greater authority and tools for the department, Beattie wrote via e-mail. This piece was produced in partnership with ProPublica.
Source: wnyc.org