The Ohio Board of Nursing met on March 19-21, 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 most of 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 March 2014 Board Meeting, the Board also voted to
issue a Notice of Opportunity for Hearing to 99 nurses. Those Notices
were 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.
As we move past the second Nursing Board Meeting for 2014, I
feel very confident in stating that this version of the Board is stricter than
any version of the Board that 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 early 2014, along with
the increased reluctance of the Board to settle cases using terms and
conditions that were common prior to 2013. Therefore, nurses who are being
investigated by the Ohio Board of Nursing and/or who are facing pending
disciplinary charges brought by the Board must be prepared to fight for fair
and reasonable settlement terms. However, those nurses may eventually
find themselves in a position where they are forced to either accept the
harsher settlement terms being insisted upon by the Board’s Secretary or take
their case to hearing so that the full Board can consider the defense and/or
mitigation evidence being presented.
For nurses who are being investigated by the Ohio Board of
Nursing and/or who face pending disciplinary charges by the Board, this means
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,
since the Board’s first offer is usually not its best offer. Finally, you
need to be willing, if necessary, to take your case to hearing if the Board is
being unreasonable in negotiating a Consent Agreement.