Recent news on nurses killing their patients at the hospitals they are serving is saddening. The healthcare practitioners who should be helping save lives are ironically the killing nurses in their chosen field. Just recently, two of the healthcare practitioners at Clarksburg VA Hospital in West Virginia were reported to have killed many of their patients by dashing saline IV bags containing doses of deadly drugs not included in the physician's order, neither needed by the patients.
The online news agency USA Today reported early this week that nurses Charles Cullen and Donald Harvey both killed dozens of patients at the hospitals they have worked at for many years now. Both of these nurses who kill the people they are supposedly caring for use heart drugs, poison like cyanide, or insulin to kill their patients. Because of their position and job at the hospital, they can easily access and approach the weak patients on their designated floors. Eventually, the two were convicted of killing their patients.
How These Killer Nurses Move
Investigators of these cases gather clues of at least two homicide cases and eight other suspicious deaths in this West Virginian hospital. Relatively, Cullen moved from one hospital to another, doing new jobs every time his managers started to suspect his everyday activities. And, even though investigators gathered forensic evidence involving the killer nurse, prosecutors did not charge him yet until his fellow nurse confessed Cullen's involvement in the crime.
Meanwhile, the arrest of Harvey was considered a matter of fortune. By using cyanide, he poisoned a man who was hospitalized following a motorcycle accident, unintentionally triggering a law in Ohio that required autopsies on all fatalities brought by a motorcycle. The clinician who performed the autopsy was capable of smelling cyanide, and this triggered the investigation.
Why Do Nurses Kill Their Patients?
While the manner of killing their patients are clearly described in every article written about these killer nurses, there are no specific reasons for doing so. Also, Cullen and Harvey are not the only healthcare workers who are convicted of murder. Other related cases have already been made known to the public, including medical errors that inadvertently harm the patients or even cause their death.
Also called the 'angels of death,' these killing nurses do not display a particularly personal reason for killing their patients. However, more frequently, nurses murder their patients intentionally and undoubtedly out of compulsion and not of compassion.
These serial killers are often called "angels of death," but those familiar with their behavior say the moniker rarely describes their crimes. More often, they kill with intent and out of compulsion, not compassion.
