Ohio Nurses Face Strict Board – Keys to Saving Your License and January 2014 Meeting Update

As we enter 2014, nurses who are being investigated by the Ohio Board of Nursing and/or who are facing pending disciplinary charges brought by the Board must know that this version of the Board is stricter than any version of the Board I have seen since I started representing nurses in 1999.  The proof is in the relatively harsh Consent Agreements and Adjudication Orders adopted by the Board during 2013 and the increased reluctance of the Board to settle cases using terms and conditions that were common prior to 2013.  The proof is also in the fact that the Board currently takes more cases to hearing when nurses will not accept the harsher settlement terms that the Board has recently been insisting upon in its proposed Consent Agreements. 

Instead of having 1 full time Hearing Examiner and using 1-2 contract Hearing Examiner’s as needed, the Board now has 3 full time Hearing Examiner’s and consistently uses 3 contract Hearing Examiners in an attempt to keep up with what seems to be an ever increasing number of cases that go to hearing instead of settling through a Consent Agreement. 

What does this mean for nurses who are being investigated by the Ohio Board of Nursing and/or who face pending disciplinary charges by the Board?  Quite simply, you will be engaged in a struggle with the Board to obtain the most lenient sanction possible through a Consent Agreement and you may be forced to take your case to hearing to try to obtain a better outcome than is being offered through Consent Agreement.  To make it through that struggle and obtain a positive outcome for your nursing license, you will need to know who to communicate with, who to avoid communicating with and how to leverage positive facts in presenting your defense to the Board.   You will also need to be patient in negotiating the terms of a Consent Agreement with the Board (the Board’s first offer is not usually its best offer) and you will need to be willing, if necessary, to take your case to hearing if the Board is being unreasonable in negotiating a Consent Agreement. 

The Ohio Board of Nursing met on January 16-17, 2014.  The Board voted to approve Consent Agreements to resolve the charges pending against numerous nursing clients of Graff & McGovern.  Most of those Consent Agreements were hard fought and took 3-6 months to negotiate the reasonable outcomes.   The Board also deliberated upon numerous Reports and Recommendations to resolve charges against nurses whose cases went to hearing instead of having the charges resolved through a Consent Agreement.  The Board’s Adjudication Orders in those cases stuck with the recent trend of imposing harsher sanctions than in years past and illustrated the fact that the Board is not obligated to follow the Hearing Examiner’s Recommendations. 

At the January 2014 Board Meeting, the Board also voted to issue a Notice of Opportunity for Hearing to 77 nurses.  Those Notices will be mailed to the respective nurses via certified mail this week.  Any nurses receiving a Notice of Opportunity for Hearing  from the Board should strongly consider consulting with experienced legal counsel to protect their interests and they should be mindful of the need to submit a written hearing request to the Board no later than 30 days from the date the Board mailed the Notice.  The failure to comply with the 30-day deadline will leave a nurse with none of the rights afforded by Ohio Revised Code Chapter 119, and it will enable the Board to sanction the nurse’s license without obtaining any input and/or agreement from the nurse.