“There are obviously people who bought transcripts who are fraudulent and should not be practicing nursing under any circumstances,” said Atlanta attorney Hahnah Williams. New York’s Office of the Professions posted on the state education department’s website that it expects some of the 903 licensees who attended the schools “did, in fact, attend required hours and clinicals and are properly licensed.” Those people are being asked to have a qualified nursing program submit verification.Īttorneys for some of the nurses in New York and Georgia say nurses who legitimately earned diplomas are getting caught up in the investigation. The agency has not found any instances of patients being harmed. Texas Board of Nursing general counsel James “Dusty” Johnston said more charges could come as officials develop “the necessary information for each individual.”Ī spokesperson for Veterans Affairs said it removed 89 nurses “from patient care” nationwide last year immediately after being notified by federal officials. The 23 nurses facing possible license revocations in Texas can continue working while their disciplinary cases are pending. The Georgia Board of Nursing asked 22 nurses to voluntarily surrender their licenses. The Delaware Board of Nursing annulled 26 licenses. ![]() licenses of 17 people and denied license applications for four. The Washington State Nursing Care Quality Assurance Commission rescinded the R.N. It was not entirely clear how many of the roughly 2,400 nurses with credentials from these schools are currently employed, or where.įederal officials shared information so states could pursue nurses with phony academic credentials. Investigators identified the Florida nursing schools as the Palm Beach School of Nursing Siena College, a school in Broward County that wasn’t related to the college of the same name in New York and the Sacred Heart International Institute, which was also based in Broward County and had no relation to a university with a similar name in Connecticut. Many of the students took their licensing exam in New York, where they can sit it multiple times, according to investigators. Students came not only from Florida, but also New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas and Delaware. The nurses got jobs across the country, including at a hospital in Georgia, Veterans Affairs medical centers in Maryland and New York, a skilled nursing facility in Ohio, and an assisted living facility in New Jersey, according to court filings. Some had been health care providers in other countries. ![]() How did so many test takers pass without the required classroom and clinical work? In some cases, they were experienced L.P.N.s seeking to become R.N.s. Around 2,400 of those people then passed a licensing exam to obtain jobs as registered nurses and licensed practical nurses or vocational nurses in multiple states, prosecutors say. Those cases are pending.Ībout 7,600 students paid an average of $15,000 for bogus diplomas, according to prosecutors. ![]() Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Markenzy Lapointe announced in late January. Twenty-five defendants, including school owners and alleged recruiters, have been charged, U.S. States are acting in the wake of Operation Nightingale, a federal investigation into what officials say was a wire fraud scheme in which several now-closed Florida nursing schools sold phony nursing diplomas and transcripts from 2016 to 2022. “The public needs to know that when they’re the most fragile, when they’re sick, when they’re in a hospital bed, that the individual who is at their bedside has gone through the required training,” said Jennifer Mensik Kennedy, president of the American Nurses Association union. ![]() But there’s wide agreement in the industry that nurses with fraudulent degrees need to be rooted out. In some cases, lawyers for the nurses contend states are questioning the credentials of caregivers who earned diplomas legitimately.
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