However, in this case there are other reasons for the Court to rule against the nurse.  The younger nurses she offered for purposes of comparison were not valid comparisons because they were not guilty of the same misconduct.  Falsification of charting by a nurse is a legitimate non-discriminatory reason for disciplinary action against a nurse.  Having falsified her charting, it is irrelevant to the nurse’s case that the hospital issued a directive, after her incident, barring nurses from discharging patients based on progress notes alone.  UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT ALABAMA July 9, 2018

  A fifty-five year-old nurse who had been working at the hospital on the same neuro progressive care unit for eleven years honored a patient’s request for discharge, based on a physician’s progress note that the patient would possibly be eligible for discharge that afternoon or the next morning.  When she discharged the patient the nurse wrote a progress note that she had obtained a verbal discharge order from the physician over the phone.  That was plainly untrue.  The situation came to light when the physician reviewed the chart the next day after the patient came back and had to be readmitted to the hospital.

  After an investigation the nurse was offered a transfer to another unit or termination with thirty days severance pay.  The nurse neither accepted or declined the offer.  She was officially terminated after she failed to report for her start date on her new unit.

  The US District Court for the Northern District of Alabama found fatal flaws in the nurse’s age discrimination case against her former employer.  The nurse tried to prove age discrimination by pointing to several younger nurses who were not disciplined after discharging patients without signed written orders in the charts.  However, in each of those other cases the nurses had obtained actual verbal orders from the physicians which had not yet been entered and countersigned by the physicians at the time of patient discharge.  That is very different from fabricating the existence of a nonexistent order.

  The Court also ruled it irrelevant that the hospital issued a directive to its nurses after the fact not to discharge a patient based only on a progress note.  An express order from the physician was required.  According to the Court, that did not retroactively validate that this nurse acted correctly discharging a patient based merely on the physician’s progress note in the chart. Bellows v. Hospital, 2018 WL 3348979 (N.D. Ala., July 9, 2018).