In this Club Nurse episode, host Colton Lord opens with a promotion for Nurse.org’s month‑long giveaway and invites listeners to follow the show. He then delivers a concise nurse‑news segment covering two major stories. First, the American Nurses Association (ANA) and nine allied nursing organizations have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the U.S. Department of Education’s new rule that classifies nursing graduate programs outside the “professional‑degree” category, capping lifetime federal loan borrowing for nursing students at $100,000—half the $200,000 limit for law, medicine, and other professions. The suit seeks to block the rule, arguing it will exacerbate shortages of advanced‑practice nurses by making education unaffordable. Second, a King County jury convicted David Mungai Njinga on all 11 counts for operating a fraudulent staffing agency that placed unlicensed impostor nurses in Washington long‑term‑care facilities, using the credentials of five real nurses. The conviction carries a potential 12‑16.5‑year prison sentence, highlighting the dangers of credential theft to patient safety. The episode ends with a brief sponsor spot for Tallywise, a job‑offer comparison service.
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Welcome to Club Nurse. I'm Colton Lord, your host. By you being here today, it shows me that you are someone who wants to learn, grow, laugh, connect, and just let your emotions flow. We are here to share real stories and hear real-life experiences from real people. You are not alone in this, and Club Nurse is here to show you that. Don't forget to follow the show and share today's episode with someone you love. Now, let's get started. Let's dive into today's conversation. Welcome back to the Club Nurse Podcast. My name is Colton Lord, your host, and today we are going to cover some nursing news. And if you have been following along on this podcast, you know that sometimes we cover nurse news, sometimes we have a guest on and they share what they are doing in the world of healthcare, sharing their nursing journey, uh, or just, you know, I've even had people on who are not nurses who share kind of from a patient perspective and what they've gone through in their health journey. But today is one of our nurse news segments, and I'm going to share with you six of the most up-to-date breaking nursing news stories on nurse.org. If you are interested in hearing more, if something I say sparks your interest and you want to hear more about it, go to nurse.org/news. You can find all the articles with in-depth information about these breaking news stories, and if there are any updates that happen with these stories, nurse.org is great at updating those articles and keeping them fresh for you to review with the most accurate and up-to-date information. So let's dive into it. The American Nurses Association and 9 nursing groups sue the Department of Education over nursing's professional degree exclusion. We have talked about this multiple times in this podcast about the Department of Education not classifying nursing post-baccalaureate nursing programs as professional degrees. That is a very important designation. That title matters to be grouped in with those professional degrees, and it's all because of funding. So beginning July 1st, 2026, so in about a month, the rule would cap federal loan borrowing for nursing graduate students at $100,000 over a lifetime, which is half of the $200,000 cap available for law, medicine, and other professional degree fields, making it harder for nurses seeking a profession in or a degree in getting like the nurse practitioner or a certified registered nurse anesthetist. It really limits people from pursuing those degrees unless they have the financial means to do so, which a lot of people don't. A lot of nurses don't because a base pay for a nurse in this country is not what it should be. It's definitely not enough to just pay out of pocket for most people for a degree. A lot of people, most people need some kind of help, need to borrow money. And a lot of times, especially for CRNA programs, I know this, you're gonna have to borrow more than $100,000 usually. I'm speaking generally here. So this lawsuit from the asks a federal court to block the rule before it takes effect and parallels a separate challenge from 24 state attorney generals, raising the stakes for an advanced practice workforce already facing major shortages. So really, this is just making it harder for nurses to obtain advanced degrees, limiting the number of professional nurses in our workforce. And this was a post American Nurses official Instagram— the American Nurses Association took to Instagram and made a post that Says the American Nurses Association applauds coalition lawsuit against Department of Education and announces intent to file lawsuit. ANA, in collaboration with other nursing organizations, will file a nurse-forward lawsuit challenging the Department of Education's exclusion of nursing from the definition of professional degree programs in the final rule implementing federal graduate loan borrowing limits. ANA and its partners are committed to ensuring nurses retain full access to the federal loan resources necessary to obtain their education And we will defend that commitment in court. Thank you, American Nurses Association, and thank you everybody who's out there on the ground doing this work. Because again, first of all, let's just talk about how insane it is that we need a cap of $200,000 for borrowing. But that is just the fact. That is the truth. That is what the reality of our country and the education of seeking higher education in this country—it's expensive. And if it's something that you really want to do, you typically have to borrow money, and you have to borrow a lot of money. And I know a lot of people who. Seek this level of education, just accept the fact that they're taking on student loans that are equivalent to maybe a mortgage or maybe a little bit less than a mortgage. But it's a lot of money and it's really an investment in your future. And if it's something that you really are passionate about and you really want, you're going to do it, you're going to get the loans and you're going to just deal with that part of it. So thank you, American Nurses Association, and we will keep following this story. Again, I would sign up for the Nurse.org newsletter because that's where you're going to get the most up-to-date articles and you'll be able to follow the story as it progresses. And we'll see how those lawsuits go. All right. The next headline: Fake nurses couldn't even take a blood pressure. A jury just convicted their boss. A King County jury convicted Kent's David Mungai Njinga on all 11 counts of running fraudulent staffing agencies that placed unlicensed, unqualified imposter nurses in long-term care facilities using the identities and credentials of 5 real Washington nurses. Some of these nurses couldn't even take a blood pressure. They were administering the wrong medications. We don't even need to talk. We don't even need to dive into why this is not okay. We've we have covered on this news. I don't know why these stories keep coming up of fraudulent nurses and people stealing the identity of a nurse to work. I just think it's crazy. I really think it's crazy. Like there has got to be more creative and other ways to make some money. Like if you are using, if you're fraudulently making money, there's got to be other ways to do that. That's not like assuming care of other people's lives when you are not credentialed and trained to do so. It baffles me. I can't even wrap my mind around. it, because I just don't understand how. I mean, when I've gotten jobs, it's hard enough to verify who— my, my own identity with, with these organizations. So to do it fraudulently, it just like really blows my mind. But this boss now faces 12 to 16, 16.5 years in prison at his June 16th, 2026 sentencing, underscoring how a stolen license can be misused without a nurse's knowledge. Oh my God. Yeah, this is crazy. So again, if you would like to know how this, uh, shakes up, how this shakes out. I would follow along on nurse.org, uh, and we will see what the, what the prosecution is for this person. It's wild.
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This story is really sad. This next headline, I, I saw this on social media before I even saw this article, um, but a nursing assistant dies 1 hour after collapsing while working at a hospital. JoKoya Renee Morgan, a 19-year-old certified nursing assistant, collapsed at 4:12 in the morning during her overnight shift at Children's of Alabama in Birmingham on May 26th, 2026, and was pronounced dead at UAB, which What is that? I'm assuming University of Alabama Birmingham, maybe a hospital less than an hour later. Why it matters is because her sudden death on the job, paired with unverified social media allegations that she was denied permission to go home and that coworkers were stopped from giving aid, has touched a nerve among healthcare workers worried about staff safety and being heard when they feel unwell. The Jefferson County Coroner's Office has ruled out foul play but says the final cause of death is pending additional laboratory studies, and the hospital says it's Teams responded with appropriate life-saving measures. Again, these, these were unverified allegations that she was denied going home after saying she was sick and that coworkers were asked to not intervene. These are unverified allegations, but these are things that are kind of circulating on social media and obviously sparking some outrage amongst social media, healthcare workers. Wild. Again, these, some of these stories, when I, when I read them and I'm researching them and looking them up, I just like almost can't believe them. Uh, but that's I think how most of the news really goes, even not healthcare-related news. Yeah, anyway, it does beg the question: if you're not feeling well at work, are you going to speak up? Are you going to be retaliated against? Are people going to look at you like, "Oh my God, you're leaving us! We need help." I don't know. You know what? As a nurse who's done this for a little while now, I I think that at the end of the day, this is and this goes back to what they say about filling your own cup. You can't take care of others if you're not taking care of yourself, and that is so true. And I I think at the beginning of my nursing career, I was more afraid. to call out sick, or, you know, I would just— I had that mindset mentality of like, oh, just push through, push through, push through. And now I'm like, no, you know what, girl, I'm not feeling well. You have to take care of yourself. If you're not feeling well, call out. I know it's easier said than done. Some places don't foster that kind of culture environment. There are dynamics with managers, and I understand how difficult that may be. But I just got to say, you really have to take care of yourself first and foremost. Or you become a patient. All right, we have two more stories to cover. Did I say six stories at the beginning? I think I only have five actually to cover. So that was three. We have two more. This headline reads: California psych nurses just won safe staffing ratios after 27 years. California's mandatory safe RN-to-patient staffing ratios for acute psychiatric hospitals took effect on June first, more than two decades after they were required by. Safe staffing law, the California Nurses Association sponsored and won in 99. There were I guess there were some loopholes and some like there were nurses that were responsible for up to 24 patients during a single 12-hour shift. So wild stuff. I mean yeah, like when you're taking care of a psychiatric population, understood it's not as like medically complex. You're not doing you know a lot of the things that you do on a medical floor. But girl, that is hard, and a lot of those patients take a lot of time and resources, and it's not easy. I I can't even imagine what these nurses. Go through who work in acute, like, inpatient psychiatric facilities. It is really hard work. It's a very vulnerable population. So safe staffing, yes indeed, should be mandated in these facilities. The implementation was delayed after hospitals warned that more than 800 acute psychiatric beds would close immediately if the original deadline of January 31st was kept. Hospitals say complying will cost more than $145 million statewide. Permanent rulemaking is still ahead, And nurses say they will remain vigilant to prevent industry pressure from weakening the standards and are pushing for further improvements, including explicit pediatric ratios and protections for ancillary staff. I can't speak much to this. Like I said, I've never worked in an inpatient psychiatric facility. I remember doing my clinicals there. Just from my experience in an emergency department, I know how demanding it is, how difficult it can be, and how much time they deserve. You know, a psychiatric patient is still having an acute illness. It should be treated as such, and they deserve the resources and to have safe staffing just as much as the next person does. All right, and the last thing I'm going to cover today, uh, this is just— let's talk about AI. Oh my gosh, I know we're all so tired of hearing about AI, but we got to talk about it. Uh, AI failed to catch a nurse anesthetist stealing drugs for months. Coworkers stepped in. So it was the human intervention that caught this, not the AI. Um, there was a nurse anesthetist in Chattanooga, Tennessee who was diverting fentanyl for over 4 months, and the hospital's AI-powered medication monitoring Monitoring software Sentry 7 never raised an alarm. This matters because Sentry 7 and similar tools are marketed to hundreds of US hospitals as a safeguard against drug diversion. Yet here it was human coworkers, not the algorithm, who caught the impaired nurse. Uh, the nurse did settle with the Tennessee Board of Nursing in November of last year, and it is accepting probation and drug counseling and faces no criminal charges. While experts debate whether the failure was software malfunction or user error. So if you want to know how they were finally caught, in June of last year, coworkers reported that the CRNA appeared impaired while on duty. According to the nursing board, he had slurred speech, appeared extremely tired, and was seen standing with his eyes closed and swaying, exhibited head nodding while standing upright, and appeared to have difficulty keeping his eyes open. I mean, girl, that's going to be me on the night shift. But he subsequently failed a drug test and was fired. When the hospital audited his dispensing records over the 4-month period, it found a approximately 5 instances when Century 7 did not flag missing drugs, plus additional inconsistencies between drug dispensing and waste documentation that the board said should have been flagged by the automated monitoring system. Proof that AI can't do everything and that we need humans. We cannot live on just technology and AI. While I understand it can help, and I have had people on the podcast who have talked about how AI can help us, and I think there really are some ways we don't have to be like totally terrified of it. This just goes to prove that you need you need humans. Okay, we need humans up in there. Anyway, that's what I've got for you this week on Nurse News, the Club Nurse Podcast, our Nurse News segment. Like I said, catch all of these on nurse.org/news. All these articles are posted; they're updated. Follow on social media nurse_org. They really highlight a lot of these stories. They come out so quickly and make them accessible to you. And I think as a nurse, as a healthcare worker. While I don't think it's healthy to be overly saturated in all this information all the time, I do think it's important to stay in the know and to kind of keep your alarms up, keep the knowledge coming in. That way you know what's going on, current events in healthcare. It is important. And that is what I will say. Thank you so much. My name is Colton Lord. This is the Clev Nurse Podcast, and we'll see you guys next time. Thank you. Bye. From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to thank you for being here at Club Nurse. I hope you gained something valuable from today's episode, and if you did, remember to share this episode with someone that you love. Follow me on socials at Nurse Daddies or Colton Lord 17, and be sure to follow nurse.org to stay informed with all of the hottest healthcare topics. Until next time, take care of yourself the way you take care of everyone else. Love ya. Bye.
