Plenty of families have already sued or are planning to sue hospitals that employed alleged killer nurse Charles Cullen. However, a common thread in many suits “seems to be that the lawyers pursuing them have gathered little evidence that Cullen was responsible for patients who died or fell ill.” (“Killer Nurse Case Sparks Medical Lawsuits”, AP/FoxNews.com, Jan. 15). And columnist Paul Carpenter of the Allentown (Pa.) Morning Call finds an irony in the circumstance (see Dec. 18) that Cullen bounced from hospital to hospital while each new employer was kept in the dark about his past, fear of litigation having choked off frank reference-giving: “it was the legal establishment that prevented employers from learning about a prospective worker’s background, allowing Nurse Cullen to run amok, and now it is the legal establishment that is eagerly seeking to reap enormous profits by blaming the medical institutions that employed him.” (“Who, the man asks, created the problem?”, Dec. 23)

Filed under: hospitals, workplace