Whistle-blowing Texan gives Nevada nurses hope

A nurse with the guts to blow the whistle on a well-connected doctor was acquitted Thursday on an absurd charge that never should have been filed. Jurors took about an hour to toss this silly case.

Afterward, each juror hugged the nurse.

Although all this took place in West Texas, nurses all over the nation followed the criminal case carefully, wondering if blowing the whistle on wrongdoing might send them to prison.

Last April, two West Texas nurses sent an unsigned letter to the Texas Medical Board alleging a doctor was engaged in misconduct. The letter provided patient identification numbers for six patients, but not the patients' names. They alleged Dr. Rolando Arafiles Jr. encouraged patients to buy herbal medicine from him and tried to use hospital supplies from the 25-bed Winkler County hospital to perform a procedure at a patient's home.

After the medical board told the doctor he was being investigated, he filled a harassment complaint with the Winkler County sheriff, also his patient.

The sheriff seized hospital computers and identified the nurses as Anne Mitchell and Vickilyn Galle. Then the district attorney charged both with a felony -- misuse of official information.

The doctor claimed the nurses had a vendetta against him and a county judge refused to dismiss the charges in August, so the case plodded forward. Before the trial, the prosecutor dismissed the charge against Galle, but wasted resources with this week's four-day trial against Mitchell, 52, who had been a nurse for 25 years at Winkler County Memorial Hospital.

The New York Times reported witnesses had heard Mitchell refer to Arafiles as a "witch doctor." Yet other nurses testified her concerns were legitimate and administrators did not deal with complaints adequately.

Though Las Vegas sometimes seems like a small town where everyone is connected in some fashion, Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie, District Attorney David Roger and our judges would have sent this case packing.

Despite that, Debra Scott, executive director of the Nevada Board of Nursing, said Nevada nurses had a lot of concern about what was going on in Kermit, Texas, population 5,000. "This is really good news for health care workers," she said Friday.

Nevada law, like Texas law, requires nurses to report medical wrongdoing.

"People do use regulatory boards as hammers and that's sad because that's not what we're here for," Scott said. One example she cited was an ex-husband trying to get an ex-wife in trouble.

Even before the two nurses were indicted, they were fired from the county hospital. And that keeps nurses trapped in a cone of silence -- the fear of losing their jobs.

When I wrote about "the touch," where a second doctor enters the operating room, touches the patient and then bills the patient for assisting, doctors and nurses confirmed to me it was more common than one would suspect. But it was an insurance rip-off, not a question of patient safety, which they are obliged to report by law.

The nurses who followed the directions of Dr. Dipak Desai, even knowing his practices were unsafe, didn't speak up, with one exception. (And her complaints were not investigated.) But when the case broke open and patients were identified as being infected with hepatitis through those practices, six nurses at Desai's endoscopy clinics immediately turned in their licenses and aren't working as nurses any more.

Jurors are no different than the rest of us. We all hope and pray that nurses and all health care providers follow their legal and moral obligation to be patient advocates. The many who do deserve hugs and respect, not retaliation and certainly not prosecution.

Jane Ann Morrison's column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail her at Jane@reviewjournal.com or call (702) 383-0275. She also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/morrison.