Patients at Risk When Hospitals Fail To Report Sexual Assaults
A registered nurse is scheduled to go on trial in Orange County, Florida today in a case involving an alleged sexual assault of a 38-year-old hospital patient. It is not the first time nurse Kevin Laing has been accused of inappropriate conduct, according to a report in the Orlando Sentinel. He was never arrested for one complaint, and felony charges in another were dropped when the patient died.
“Laing’s case illustrates the vulnerability of patients when Florida hospitals fail to report sexual-abuse allegations to the state and to one another,” reports the Orlando Sentinel. State law requires hospitals to report every allegation of sexual misconduct to the Florida Department of Health, which has the authority to suspend a nurse’s license. “But that did not happen when Laing was initially accused of misconduct,” a Sentinel investigation found.
This case and the Orlando Sentinel report raise an important concern about health care providers who conduct their own “in-house” investigations of sexual misconduct allegations without notifying the Florida Department of Health and the local police agency.
Investigating a sexual assault is a complicated task. Law enforcement officers are trained to identify and preserve forensic evidence that could confirm a sexual assault. When a nursing home or hospital conducts and investigation, the forensic aspect of the evidence is overlooked. The patient is cleaned, and gowns and bed sheets are sent to the laundry. As a result, the most compelling evidence in the case disappears.
Let’s face it, a hospital or nursing home does not want to acknowledge that an employee has sexually assaulted a patient. The tendency often is to simply give lip service to the investigation, document a finding of no abuse and never contact the state health department or policy agency. The offending employee is quietly fired only to resurface at another facility to do the same thing to another innocent patient.
Individuals can do horrible things. But when corporations cover it up, it enables the perpetrator to abuse again.
