New York Times publishes its investigation into the 16-year career of the confessed killer nurse: “Mr. Cullen’s case has exposed a fundamental weakness in health care: the difficulty of prospective employers to learn of someone’s past troubles. Employers frequently refuse to pass on negative information, even about people they have fired, for fear of being sued for slander by the former employee. …[Mandated reporting systems are weak as well.] ‘There needs to be some kind of safe harbor that would allow past employers who’ve taken adverse actions to share that, and to describe the associated facts, without fear of legal action,’ said Dr. Arnold Milstein, a health care consultant and one of the founders of the Leapfrog Group, a national business alliance dedicated to improving health care.” (Richard Perez-Pena, David Kocieniewski and Jason George, “Through Gaps in System, Nurse Left Trail of Grief”, Feb. 29)(see Jan. 29, Dec. 18). Cut to Cure (Mar. 2) comments: “So we have the lawyers saying on the one hand if we will just clean our own house and get rid of the bad apples, the medical liability problem will take care of itself. But when such efforts are made, the lawyers try to put a stop to it.”
The Christian Science Monitor has a good roundup of the state of reference-chilling (Randy Dotinga, “Would you hire this man?”, Mar. 1) but then goes on to illustrate the problem only too well by way of a companion article whose advice is summed up in its title: “If an old boss smears you, hire a detective” (Jennifer LeClaire, Mar. 1). According to the latter piece, one complainant was successful in extracting a cash settlement from a former employer on the grounds that it had refused to respond at all to reference requests.