Judge Rules Against Georgia Nurses: Athens Hospital Accused of Manipulating COVID-19 Test Results

Updated:   Published

Nursing is hard enough without having to deal with this ...

These nurses are some very brave souls to fight the Hospital administrators, some doctors, and the government in this small Georgia hospital.

'I think the judge is wrong': Nurses lose against Athens hospital accused of manipulating COVID-19 test results

5 hours ago, Davey Do said:

Your post hits home with me, ganurse.

Back in '15, I reported overt safety infractions, following the chain of command. Nothing was resolved. I reported the infractions to IDPH, OSHA, and JC and again, nothing was done.

I took it as, "Oh well, I've done what I could", CMA, and went on to be the best nurse I could be.

Then, earlier this year, I again followed the chain of command in reporting violations of the Code of Conduct, P&P, and Illinois statutes.

Long story short, I was recognized with a DAISY award in February and terminated in March over trumped up charges.

It is sad when bad things happen to conscientious message carriers.

Davey, thank you for your story! I know things like this happen all the time, but I had never seen it affect loved ones in this way. To know that these nurses have children that they have to feed and truly love their careers as nurses and now they are being blackballed and ridiculed because their whistleblowing may have affected the hospital administrators bonuses just makes me sick. Money isn’t everything, folks!!

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Specializes in CCRN.

This is sketchy as hell. Either the hospital was aware what they were doing was wrong and kept going or they honestly thought what they were doing was proper procedure. Not sure which is worse. Intentional skewing of results or gross negligence. As far as I can see from CDC recommendations for collection of samples, what they did was incorrect procedure.

Also, mislabeling tracheal aspirate (on purpose apparently) as a nasal swab sample is like asking a patient to spit in a cup and labeling it as a sputum sample and asking the lab to get a culture. In what world is this OK?

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From the director of quality (quote from the linked article):

Quote

“So, there’s this thing called viral shedding and they can virally shed in their nose for up to 12 weeks," Wilkinson said in the recording. "Per Dr. Jenkins and per Dr. Visitation, once it gets down to the lungs, the viral shedding has stopped and that is where you get your true test result. So, that’s why we came back and said, let’s see what the tracheal shows."

That's curious...that it can virally shed from the nose for up to 12 weeks, but if you get a positive nasal sample you can guess that this viral shedding has stopped and it's moved to the lungs. ?

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Specializes in LTAC.

I agree it should very shady to me

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In my opinion, these nurses did the right thing, they saw something happening that they knew was wrong and they stood up for their patients. They were protecting their community from the Covid positive patients who would be let out into the world after receiving a false negative test, free to spread the disease around. It's disgraceful how the facility and the governmental agencies are treating this situation.

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