Nurses Still Face Strict Board; March Board Update and Keys to Saving Your License

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.