The Board has legal authority to revoke a nurse’s license for one instance, a first offense, of intentional falsification of a patient’s chart. DISTRICT COURT OF APPEAL OF FLORIDA December 13, 2017
A resident in an assisted living facility was found unresponsive in the dining hall. The nurse told a non-licensed staff person to put the patient in his bed so she could do CPR. However, before starting CPR the nurse verified that the resident had a Do Not Resuscitate order on file, so the nurse left him in bed without further treatment and he died later that day.
The problem was that the nurse documented in the chart that he was found unresponsive in his bed, not in the dining hall. That was intentional falsification of the facts by the nurse. After its investigation the Department of Health reported the nurse’s falsification of the chart to the Board of Nursing with a recommendation for probation and a fine. The Board, however, revoked the nurse’s license.
The District Court of Appeal of Florida upheld the Board. It was not for the Court to determine the nurse’s punishment. The legal authority to do that is vested by law with the Board of Nursing. A decision of the Board can be overruled by a court only for abuse of discretion. In that regard state law expressly grants the Board the discretion to revoke a nurse’s license for intentional falsification of medical documentation and does not require the Board to allow for it being a first offense as a mitigating factor. Campbell v. Dept., __ So. 3d __, 2017 WL 6347372 (Fla. App., December 13, 2017).