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| Nurses work in pairs as they wait for patients for coronavirus testing at Cal Expo in Sacramento on Wednesday, April 15, 2020. |
The board is responsible for investigating misconduct by nurses and can take disciplinary action including suspending nurses’ licenses. The auditor found in 2016 that the board was assigning too many cases to each of its investigators and that investigations were often taking more than three years, even in cases including allegations of patient harm.
The auditor determined the board should keep caseloads to 20 investigations per investigator.
When the nursing board hadn’t reached that number by November 2018, three executives hatched a “plan to deceive the state auditor,” according to Tuesday’s report.
The day they had to report the caseload number to auditors, the executives reassigned a bunch of cases to managers who don’t normally carry caseloads and to an investigator who was out on extended leave, according to the report.
The next day, while the auditor’s team was reviewing a report showing the caseload goal had been met, the executives started reversing the reassignments, according to the report.
“The serious and egregious nature of the executives’ overall behavior regarding this matter constituted gross misconduct,” the report states.
The report doesn’t identify the executives. One of the three has since left the board, according to the report.
The nursing board and the Department of Consumer Affairs are investigating and have placed a notice of investigation in the file of the executive who left, Russ Heimerich, a spokesman for the Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency, which oversees the board and the department, said in an email.
The agency and the board are working with the auditor to determine the maximum number of cases investigators should be assigned, Heimerich said in the email.
“We will also begin a department-wide initiative to ensure that this can never happen again,” he said in the email.
The report suggests disciplining the executives and fining them up to $5,000.
A group of employees at the nursing board has been pushing for leadership changes at public meetings. In February, former executive director Joseph Morris resigned after women who worked with him accused him of sexual harassment.
Since November 2018, the investigators have maintained caseloads of as many as 26 cases, according to the report.
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State nursing board executives falsified data in report to state auditor, report finds
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