Nurse Murder Research Paper

How can the serial murder of patients by nurses be prevented?

All around the world, people place their trust in nurses to take care of them to the best of their ability. In some cases, however, nurses use their immense power of life over death to commit murder. Usually, if a nurse commits murder, they do not stop at just one; rather, they commit more than one. According to Elizabeth Yardley, a professor of applied criminology at Birmingham City University, a serial killer nurse, or an “angel of death,” is defined as “a nurse who uses her position to murder at least two patients in two separate incidents with the psychological capacity for more killing” (40). The motives behind these murders are difficult to pinpoint. For example, some hypotheses

As Yorker, the dean of Georgia State University College of Law, says, the majority of nurses who end up intentionally killing their patients have a history of falsifying their credentials or other aspects of their background; therefore, many of these murderers could be stopped simply by not hiring them (1364). Yorker also says that the overall relaxed hiring methods by healthcare professionals may be in part because of the widespread shortage of nurses (1365). With a shortage of nurses, healthcare establishments are likely to take whoever they can get. Employers with lenient hiring processes hire nurses to make more money. Should the hired nurses turn out to be murderers, the health care facility would lose significantly more money in lawsuits than they would have ever made by hiring them. Yardley advocates that appropriate backgrounds checks should be rigorously followed and that references from previous employers should be requested and carefully reviewed (53). If the hiring processes of nurses was monitored, healthcare establishments could possibly eliminate many potential serial killers, as nurses who have a history of manipulating their records are more likely to commit these crimes. Ultimately, employers should be more concerned about quality of the nurses they hire instead

Nurses committing crimes that are completely opposite to the core values of nursing in general makes for a difficult subject. For example, as Jones, a professor in Liverpool, UK says, “as a hospital may attempt to root out the small proportion of nurses who may kill, it may also create requirements on innocent members of staff that seriously challenge the nurse’s right to confidential emotional assistance. This means a nurse may be too intimidated to confide in her colleagues because she is paranoid that they will “turn her in” even if she is completely innocent (212). He goes on to say that this may challenge important notions of civil rights, as the right to confidential emotional assistance is a right of everyone else in society (212). Therefore, being hyperaware of that possibility may be detrimental to a nurse’s success, although it saves patients. As Yorker puts it, there needs to be a balance between employee rights and patient safety