Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Nurse Arrest: A Failure in Leadership

I have been following the story of the Utah ED nurse's arrest with some interest since the video first broke. Amid all the outrage and anti-cop sentiment, it's hard to learn any facts, but some have come out, and it's interesting to me.

It's interesting to me because as the Medical Director of a busy Emergency Department here in Texas, I most emphatically don't want anything like this to happen in my ED. The fact that it happened ANYwhere is a testament to what I call the supremacy of Bossiness and the failure of Leadership.

Here's my short summary of the case. If I'm substantively wrong in any point, please feel free to correct me and I'll change the OP:

1. Professional driver, driving a semi, gets hit by another vehicle; CDL laws apply here, and he must submit a blood sample by law. By signing his CDL license, he has given consent to this in advance for the rest of his professional driving life.
2. Professional cop, who is also a trained forensic phlebotomist, is dispatched to the ED to collect the blood sample that is required by law.
3. Profesional nurse, citing hospital policy, and acting as a "patient advocate" tells cop he can't take the blood sample.

So far, it's pretty straightforward. But then:

4. Cop calls his supervisor, who tells him he MUST get the blood sample NOW, based on his understanding of state and federal law governing MVC's involving CDL drivers.
5. Nurse calls her hospital administrator, who tells her she MUST NOT allow him to do so without a warrant, following hospital policy (which may or may not be in compliance with EMTALA, HIPAA, and other healthcare law).
6. Cop supervisor tells cop he must arrest the nurse and then get the blood sample.
7. Cop arrests nurse.
8. Video gets posted on YouTube and the Entire World Loses Its Mind.

Does anyone else see the big problem here? Does anyone else notice that the two people who were insisting that nobody back down were not even present? How the feck do you justify putting your people into that position without being there in person to back it up?

Look, I know that tempers can run hot in emergency situations. I work in that kind of environment every day. People get short-tempered, and say and do things that they would never do if there was time to talk it over and make a rational decision based on the best information at hand. And when people DO take the time for a time-out, and come to a mutually agreeable solution, everybody wins.

I have been in the position of the supervisor in this deal. On several occasions my phone has blown up with calls from my charge nurse, my ER doc on duty, the hospital administration, the nursing supervisor, and God knows who else, and ALL of them are blowing a gasket over some situation or other that has escalated out of hand really, really fast.

My response in each case has been as follows:

1. Tell everyone to back away from the situation, and
2. I drive in to the ED immediately.

Each time I have done this, the situation has either completely or partially resolved itself by the time I arrive. My job then has been to speak to all the parties individually, then make a judgment based on all the information. At which point all the principals breathe a sigh of relief, and say, "Fine, that's good with me."

Every time.

But in this situation, I see two professionals, a nurse and a cop, put in a situation where their respective supervisors are instructing them to do the exact opposite of what I have found to be the only way to get a just and equitable solution to a dangerous conflict. The hospital supervisor isn't a lawyer, nor a law enforcement expert. The police supervisor isn't a lawyer, nor a healthcare law expert. But neither one admits that they don't know the whole story, and then they insist that the frontline cop and nurse just bull ahead.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I think that nurse and that cop need to have a sit-down with a professional mediator to figure out how what they both did was partly right and partly wrong, and I wouldn't be surprised if they both carry a grudge for the rest of their lives. But it wasn't their fault. It was their supervisors' fault this turned into a first class Charlie Foxtrot.

But the supervisors on both sides should have their asses fired with extreme prejudice. Because in a situation that called for leadership, they BOTH failed miserably. They both decided they had to be a BOSS instead of being a LEADER.

Imagine the difference in this scenario if both supervisors had said, "Hold on, don't do anything, I'll be right there," and then got in their cars and sped to the hospital. Imagine the supervisors taking their people aside privately and getting the facts and the history of the conflict. Imagine the supervisors then sitting down in the coffee room and deciding how to solve the issue. Maybe they would have remained at a standoff, or maybe they would have reached an agreeable compromise. Maybe they'd have to get a judge to sign a warrant, or maybe they'd have just said, "Feck it, this is too trivial a problem for us to get in a snit over, let's all go get a beer."

I guaran-fecking-tee you that would not have made it on to YouTube and Facebook. But it would have been the right thing to do.

Leadership is real. Leadership is necessary. And leadership was absolutely absent in that Utah ED that day.

Thanks for the War and Peace. Now we know.

Bravo.

Another way to put it is that people should be trained to be solution oriented instead of procedure oriented.

Administrative types often get so wrapped up in rules that they can't imagine they don't apply to every situation, or that there are exceptions they don't have a clue about. But, by Jove, they are going to follow the rules! (all the way off the cliff).

Amen.

PS Got a bunch of dove yesterday.

Lack of leadership has been a problem for awhile now.

We see that in every facet of life. Some areas worse than others.

Doc: Thanks for an insider's look at the situation. LEADERSHIIT is definitely too prevalent in today's society while leadership is most definitely in short supply.

So good to read something that makes some sense of this.
'Thanks Doc. your posts are always among the best I read on the net.

Great post! A few things.....

Much of the blowback isn't "anti-cop" sentiment. It is anti bullying idiot sentiment.

The officer knew he didn't have standing to get the sample. In fact he is asked by the second officer why they just don't get a warrant and he responds that they don't have probable cause.

While the leadership was sorely lacking on both sides, the ER administrator was directly in communication with the officer. Maybe he was in route? I dunno. Same can't be said for the other side.

When it comes down to it, the fault lies at the feet of the parties directly involved. They are both adults well capable of being responsible for their own actions and emotions.

The fella trying to get the sample simply lost his patience and violated the rights of the nurse.

Amen, Doc!

Listening to that Commander talk to the nurse as she was in the police car was like listening to someone lecturing a child and not caring how contemptuous they were being. He certainly exacerbated the entire thing.

Our biggest problem is communication. Too often we don't slow down to try to fully understand what the circumstances are and we don't communicate our thoughts and intentions fully or clearly enough. We don't try to see anything from another person's perspective, it's all about "me, me, me" and "my point of view".

The time it took for this to all transpire could have seen the Cop get a telephonic search warrant as soon as he found resistance to the blood draw.

He should have never taken this situation personally. You could see the distress in the Nurse's face as she was trying to explain why it shouldn't be done without a warrant.

Too many people are promoted into leadership positions without any leadership training or even potential.

Ed

Excellent post, Doc, and this ^^^^ applies in too many situations where bosses think they know it all and "this is the way it has to be G-d-it!" Too many chiefs, not enough Indians.

There is no CDL carve out from the 4th Amendment. Violate the terms of your CDL? ....lose your CDL, however that is administrative in nature and not criminal procedure. However he was unconscious an incapable of consent....therefore the very easy work around is to get a warrant. The nurse was 100% in the right and the cop was wrong. And he should have known better than her that he was wrong. Need the blood now? Get the warrant.

DocRocket,

No matter how you post it, long or short, the cop messed up. If he wanted to arrest someone he should have arrested the person on the other end of the phone call. There was no need to brutalize the poor employee (nurse) who was trying to be a good subordinate. The cop should be do time for assault and battery and false imprisonment.

If what you say about the law is correct about consent because the driver had the CDL then the cop could have sighted the correct law with the person on the phone. He didn't and choked.

You're welcome. Now you do.

The "carve out" is when you sign for that CDL

After working for a short time in hospital security, it's obvious that hospitals do not care about what is legal or acceptable to comply with HIPAA or EMTALA. They take a very blind attitude that EVERYTHING IS A VIOLATION no matter who makes the request or the grounds (law) that allow them to make the request. I think it's because no one in medicine has every really read the HIPAA laws and does not know what is allowable. So they take an attitude that every request is not allowable and it will only get them sued if they agree with an LEO request.

The attorney's for the medical facility also take on a similar attitude which adds to the confusion. These are the people who are supposed to know and keep the hospital or medical facility advised about these kinds of issues. I'm not sure what the solution should be to fix this.


I don't know anything about the LEO making the request and I don't know anything about the nurse. But, I'm pretty sure no one at the Hospital has ever trained the supervisors what is allowable and what is not when it comes to an LEO request. My security supervisor took the time to read the law and had to train his supervisors who were not LEO or security about what is legal when a LEO made a request, but he could never train the whole hospital staff due to logistics and the numbers of staff that need trained. The hospital was not interested enough to make an attempt to train it's staff about what was legal or illegal when there was an LEO request.

Yes, I call this a leadership failure as well.
kwg

Readonly and Ringman....

I am not saying the cop was correct. I am also not saying the nurse was correct. Both of 'em got their backs up and didn't want to back down. They BOTH did the right thing by calling their supervisors, and at that point it was the supervisors' job to sort it out. BOTH the cop and nurse should have stopped right there, and waited for the supe's to get there to sort it out. But the supervisors didn't show up, so the nurse and cop couldn't de-escalate, which is how the whole thing turned into a YouTube schittshow.

Leadership could have saved the situation. But leadership was abysmally lacking.

And the stupid f*cks comment about all sorts of shiet, yet again, that wasn't addressed in the first place by the OP.

Awesome. Wish I could've been there! Still cleaning up after Harvey here.

Then get a warrant based on that "carve out".
They did not because they could not.