November 2018

  Ordering medication without a physician’s authorization is a violation of the law. Such a violation of the law is employment misconduct which justifies a registered nurse’s termination for cause. COURT OF APPEALS OF MINNESOTA October 1, 2018

  According to the court record, a registered nurse was asked by a registered nurse coworker to help her insert a patient’s nasogastric tube.  The nurse said he would help her with her patient, but only if she contacted the hospital pharmacy for sedative medication that would facilitate insertion of the tube by helping the patient to relax.  The patient’s nurse balked at contacting the pharmacy.  So the nurse in question ordered the sedative medication himself, telling the pharmacy that the physician had given a verbal order to the other nurse.

  Later he admitted that getting a medication based on a hearsay order to another nurse was improper procedure, but he also insisted that was just the way things were always done on the unit.

  The Court of Appeals of Minnesota ruled the nurse was fired for just cause and was ineligible for unemployment benefits.  The Court said expressly that even if other nurses were actually doing the same thing, their conduct was not an excuse for another nurse to violate the law.  The Court also ruled the fact that the Board of Nursing and the Department of Health did not find the nurse guilty of wrongdoing did not preclude his employer from believing he attempted to obtain a controlled substance under fraudulent pretenses and concluding it was grounds to terminate his employment. Jezierski v. System, 2018 WL 4688267 (Minn. App., October 1, 2018).