* A Calimesa nurse has a clean record despite a felony conviction for lewd and lascivious acts with a child.
"I'm completely blown away," said Julianne D'Angelo Fellmeth, administrative director of the Center for Public Interest Law at the University of San Diego and an expert on professional licensing boards in California. "Nurses are rendering care to sick people, to vulnerable people. . . . This is a fundamental failure on the part of this board."
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Escaping scrutiny
California has the largest number of registered nurses in the nation. Hospitals and clinics rely on the website of the California Board of Registered Nursing, in part, when checking out job applicants because all accusations and disciplinary actions are posted there for public review.
If the nursing board's website says that a convicted nurse has a clean record, D'Angelo Fellmeth said, "It's like fraud. It's consumer fraud."
A top nursing board official says her agency is taking the newspaper's findings seriously but was unable to say why individual cases were missed.
"We're just really putting our arms around the issue," said Heidi Goodman, the board's assistant executive director. "It's important. It's vital. It is what we do. That's our mandate: Public protection."
The newspaper's investigation found the board's screening process to be flawed in two significant ways.
First, it allows a large portion of the 343,000 active registered nurses in California to escape scrutiny. The state began requiring applicants to submit their fingerprints in 1990, so that the board would be flagged by law enforcement agencies whenever a licensed nurse was arrested. But the rule does not apply to nurses licensed before then -- a group that now numbers about 146,000.
California misses a second chance at catching errant nurses when they apply to renew their licenses every two years. Unlike many states, California does not ask nurses to disclose criminal convictions that occurred since the last time they applied.
Even California's vocational nursing board, which oversees nurses with a lesser degree of training, requires renewing nurses to report convictions. California's registered nurses are asked only to pay a fee and verify that they have completed continuing education courses.
As a result, Goodman said the board must rely on complaints and anonymous tips to discover convictions among roughly 40% of its nurses.
