"The fear is that there's any vulnerability in the consumer protection we're offering," said Carrie Lopez, the department's director.
In general, Lopez said, she does not believe it is acceptable to take two years for regulators to file a formal complaint against a convicted sex offender. "We want to see action taken as soon as possible," she said.
The best way to do that, Lopez said, is to require all applicants for professional licenses to provide their fingerprints, allowing law enforcement to notify regulators of any arrests. The vocational nursing bureau has usable fingerprints from fewer than half of its 79,000 licensees because fingerprinting has been an on-again-off-again requirement since 1952.
The Times previously reported that more than 40% of the state's 344,000 registered nurses had no fingerprints on record because they were not required before 1990. After the story ran, the Board of Registered Nursing voted to require fingerprinting for all its licensees.
Registered and vocational nurses account for the bulk of bedside care in hospitals, nursing homes and other health facilities. Registered nurses have more training and assume primary responsibility for fulfilling doctors' orders and monitoring patients' conditions. Vocational nurses perform more basic tasks such as administering medications and taking vital signs.
In examining the vocational nursing bureau, reporters reviewed 162 disciplinary decisions made in 2007 against licensed vocational nurses. The documents were obtained through a Public Records Act request because the bureau historically has not made them available on its website.
Twenty-seven nurses racked up three or more criminal convictions before regulators filed complaints against them. Three had accumulated nine or more. In some cases the bureau took so long to act that judges said revoking the nurse's license was no longer necessary to protect the public.
That was the case for Donna Redcross of Mountain View. From 1990 to 2001, she was convicted three times for petty theft, three times for driving without a license and once each for possession of methamphetamine, disturbing the peace and drunk driving, bureau records show.
But the bureau made no move to restrict her license until February 2007. An administrative law judge, citing that delay, put her on three years of administrative probation. Through her lawyer, Redcross declined to comment.
