Having spent a fair amount of time yesterday and today in a hospital, I was reminded of this post that had been stalled on the runway…

In November of last year, Netflix began running “The Good Nurse,” a disturbing movie based on the real story of Charles Cullen, a serial killer-nurse (played by Eddie Redmayne in the film), who murdered between 45 and over 400 patients at a series of hospitals and medical facilities in New jersey and Pennsylvania over a 16-year period. The film concentrates on the colleague who finally brought him down, Amy Loughren, a fellow nurse and freind (played by Jessica Chastain) who alerted the police after she became suspicious of Cullen’s links to patient deaths as well as his irregular computer accessing of medications.

The real horror of the film and the facts is that so many of the administrators of  the hospitals where Cullen committed his murders either strongly suspected that he was killing patients, were certain he was, or resorted to contrived ignorance to avoid discovering what was right in front of their staff’s eyes. At least 16 hospitals fired Cullen on various other grounds and gave him sufficiently ambiguous recommendations to allow him to find new employment where he could kill again. Law enforcement authorities were also alerted by hospital staff more than once, and let Cullen slip through their fingers. Continue reading →