Orville Lynn MajorsMale nurse/serial killer. No one reporting him.Have you ever noticed how much time and energy medicine spends persuading us that they are the victims? I had posted only about six sentences on this page about Orville Lynn Majors, just to link to for a synopsis of the case when mentioned as an example elsewhere on this site. It was not intended to be in depth or definitive. There is plenty available about him on the web for those who wish to know more. But then I got emails from an anonymous nurse who said she had been on the scene when Majors was murdering patients. It is interesting as yet another example of the medical establishments view of the world. When he was on duty, a death occurred every 23.1 hours. When he was off duty, people died only every 551.6 hours. Other nurses made bets as to which patients would die the next time Majors was on duty. Did any of them report their concerns to a state board or agency? Did any of them leak anything to the police or the press? Not for the first hundred murders or so. After reading that the anonymous nurse emailed me indignantly explaining that the nurses couldn't report it for fear of losing their jobs. So I repeated that here as an example of healthcare professionals holding their own careers to be more important than the lives of patients. The nurse read that here and emailed again saying he/she misspoke. He/she said that nurses did report it to their supervisors. My response to that is to ask where else in the working world would people become aware that a colleague was murdering customers and do no more than alert a supervisor? If you saw someone stab someone at work, wouldn't you call the police? In medicine they believe they would, but they don't. Statistics and examples (see Zarkin) prove that, but they are in denial about that. They believe they report everything even though all available information proves the contrary. Of the 147 elderly patients in his care, 130 died in a relatively brief span of time. If he had killed only, say, half of the patients in his care, or if he only had abused them, rather than murdering them, say by maiming or disfiguring or sexually assaulting them, he could have had a normal career, like Donald Harvey did for a couple of decades and James Burt did for a couple of decades. If too many complaints came in, they would have just transferred Majors to someplace else, as with Charles Cullen or Genene Jones or Michael Swango. Majors merely is yet another example of a miscreant in medicine finally getting stopped because the scale of what he was doing became more than even the medical community was willing to cover up. The anonymous nurse went on to say that when the nurses complained to their supervisors they were told something would be done about it, but when nothing was, the nurses finally wrote an anonymous letter about it to the police. How many patients have to be murdered before healthcare professionals finally to go to the police? More than a hundred? When I asked that on this page, he/she emailed indignantly telling me that if those nurses had reported it they could have been sued, which is why he/she was writing anonymously, and he/she said they could have lost their jobs, their careers and even their families. He/she then demanded that I name one time I had been in that situation in order to understand what that is like - being afraid of being sued and losing everything. This is something that surprises patients when they become victims of adverse events in medicine, the extent to which healthcare professionals not only are insulated from, but also indifferent to, what they do to their patients. This representative of the nurses at that hospital shows no awareness of the world medicine creates for its patients. Soon after injured patients experience the insulation and indifference, they often have to face the equivalent of hatred from their caregivers. The anonymous emailer doesn't even know that medicine routinely threatens patients with lawsuits to shut them up, that almost all injured patients end up in the situation he/she challenges us to name one time we have experienced. He/she also appears unaware of the darker and more sinister things that are done to patients in the name of protecting healthcare professionals. That too is covered elsewhere on this site where he/she could read it, yet he/she barks at me to do a little research to become more aware of how bad the situation is for nurses. Anyone know of any instances in which 100 nurses were murdered before anyone reported it to anyone who would do anything about it? How many nurses get physically injured and cannot get treatment because no one in medicine will diagnose iatrogenic injuries (see blacklisting)? How many nurses even know that that is what happens to injured patients? Even upon learning it, you can count on their either not believing it or deciding that it must be so rare that it is unimportant, even after having been present for a hundred murders. This one did. Name one time when we have been in that situation? Try being injured and deteriorating, watching yourself become disabled without being able to get medical attention while the people who did it to you are dragging you to court to defend yourself on such short notice that you haven't had time to find a lawyer (risk management intentionally orchestrates it to work out that way). Do you know what it is like to be so unwell you cannot manage your own care, or work, or take care of your family, and now you have to represent yourself before a judge? You are in pain and sick but you have to get your mind clear and free of pain killers to defend everything you have while your spouse frantically calls friends and relatives and goes through the phone book trying to find a lawyer who is available on such short notice. In court, you face the nurse or doctor who injured you and watch him/her sobbing about how his/her reputation could be hurt by your complaint. They have a team of lawyers and a battery of witnesses who will testify. You cannot even get a diagnosis of your injuries to show that you have them. Eventually, with enough money and enough persistence, you can, but not in time to defend yourself or heal yourself. Injuries that go untreated become inoperable scar tissue or worse. And legal issues take up the time, energy and money you should have been spending just trying to get healed. Name one time we have been threatened with a suit? We can name more than one. We also can name sins and injustices more life-ruining than law suits that were brought by nurses and doctors against the patients they injured. Apparently it is all done under the mantra of "You have to protect yourself from lawsuits" and the best defense is a good offense. Does risk management tell nurses how it handles the sins and errors committed by nurses? Of course not. They insulate them. So healthcare professionals feel innocent and aggrieved with no real awareness of the effect they have had on patients about whom they believe they care. The anonymous nurse emailing about this imagines we won't even be able to name one time we have been in that situation when we would gladly have traded places with him/her. If no one in medicine knew Majors was murdering patients for the first 50 or 100 murders it is because medicine defiantly refuses to care about or know about the long term results it has on patients. So it doesn't learn even from lethal adverse events. It normally has no honest awareness of its own failure or success rate and continues behaving in ways that suit its own purposes rather than learning what works in the long term for patients. How many nurses know how their patients are doing several years later? Try asking surgeons what the success rate is for various surgeries. They have no reliable data but they speak as though they do. They make up statistics based on anecdotal evidence. That's good enough for them. They are not among the 200,000 killed unnecessarily each year in medicine. The anonymous emailer said that when Union bought the hospital, "they didnt want anyone who worked there in any position any longer.If they couldn't find a reason to fire you or make you resign, they bullied you out." He/she says that anyone even mentioned in the court proceedings does not work there anymore. Mobbing and bullying in medicine is covered elsewhere on this site. It is an issue that gets too little attention. He/she says, "They are not just fired, they are blackballed from ever working again. A lot of them are now on welfare, unable to find work, losing there homes, families, kids, everything. I'm not only talking that one hospital but all hospitals! These people are being fired for do the right thing, not failing to report." He/she, like virtually everyone in medicine, has no awareness of how often they fail to report. But we agree with him/her. Failing to report is not what they get fired for. Failing to report kills patients, but that is not what they get fired for. They work in a system that fires them for reporting. That's too bad. Reporting is what saves the lives of patients, but they get fired for that. Not reporting is what is normal in medicine. See Janice Scully, M.D. for an example of how it is that only 1.5% of adverse events get reported in medicine at best. When the problem is criminal, the rate is even lower, as is covered elsewhere on this site. So a hundred patients get murdered before someone finally goes outside of the system to stop it. There needs to be a more well-known and more realistic complaint system. Currently there only are pretenses of such. There needs to be one that isn't run by healthcare professionals. They are the ones who cover up these problems in order to protect their own at the expense of patients. The culture in medicine is dedicated to that. Just look at how state medical boards handle the complaints of patients (see OSMB). There needs to be a complaint process run by someone who actually is on the side of patients. Even if a more realistic complaint process is established someday, what are the odds that healthcare professionals are going to use it? Doctors and nurses don't report each other except in the rarest of cases. We need to make it possible for them and for victims to speak. In two years more than 160 suspicious deaths happened during Orville's watch. That's one and a half per week. If he only had disabled them, he most probably could have continued preying on patients for many years. No one is tracking how patients fare from their healthcare so there is no routine mechanism that would notice. But murder did manage to catch someone's attention after a while, when he got sloppy and left tracks you didn't have to be paying any particular attention to find, someone finally noticed. People in medicine will view this information, and this page, as a war on them. If they were as interested in the well-being of their patients as they believe they are, they wouldn't. The Clinton, Indiana hospital changed its name from Vermillion County Hospital to West Central Community Hospital.
|
Home |
Table of Contents |
It's a Path
|