The Ohio Board of Nursing met on July 30-31, 2015. Jim McGovern of Graff & McGovern, LPA, attended and otherwise participated as legal counsel for numerous nurses. His report is as follows.
Fortunately, 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 4-6 months to negotiate the
reasonable outcomes.
The Board
also deliberated upon 2 Reports and Recommendations to address charges
against nursing clients of Graff & McGovern whose cases went to hearing
instead of having the charges resolved through a Consent Agreement. As of this posting, we are still waiting for word upon whether the Board adopted the favorable sanctions recommended by the Hearing Examiners.
Given that the Board has now completed 4 of its 6 Board Meetings
for 2015, I believe it is fair to comment that the Board has continued its trend over recent years of engaging in larger scale enforcement of the Nurse Practice Act and imposing harsher sanctions for violations of the Act. That
has been the case both when charges are resolved through Consent Agreements
and when charges are resolved through Adjudication Orders.
Furthermore, during the past 18 months, just about 50 percent of my nursing clients who elected to take
their cases to hearing received a more lenient sanction compared to what
they were being offered through proposed Consent Agreement.
I am now thoroughly convinced 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. That by no means suggests that they are bad Board Members. It simply means that nurses who violate the Act are at high risk of being harshly sanctioned. The proof is in the relatively harsh Consent Agreements and
Adjudication Orders adopted by the Board during 2013-2015, 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. Regardless of their efforts, some of 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.
James M. McGovern, Esq.
Phone: 614-228-5800 Ext. 2
Fax: (614) 228-8811
E-mail: jmcgovern@grafflaw.com 
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