Nurse News: Fake Nurse With Kenyan Fraud Past Arrested, ER Staff Raise Money to Fly Custodian Home, and Nursing Excluded as a ‘Professional’ Degree

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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 dive into today's conversation.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Club Nurse Podcast. We are gonna cover some nurse news today. I hope that everybody had a wonderful and fabulous and loving Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving holiday, even if you were by yourself. I did not spend any time with my family as I was working. I was at my, you know, sister's house in Tennessee, as that's where I'm staying right now. And she went to a friend's house, brought me, you know, some good food. So that was nice. But I was working. And I understand that the holidays are not always the happiest time of year for a lot of us, for many reasons— grief, family drama, maybe you're going through a big divorce or breakup, or your kids are traveling. Or off to college and you don't get to see them, or this is your first, you know, holiday season without your family member who died last year. So many different things. The holidays, I think, just bring up a lot for us. We're faced with just seeing things on social media and everybody's, you know, perfect life as we see it on social media. And if you could see me, I would be doing air quotes because that's what social media shows us is everybody's perfect life. Anyway, I really hope that everybody is safe, had a great holiday wherever and however that looked for you. We are going to cover some news. For anybody who has not tuned in to this podcast before, my name is Colton Lord. I am the host of this podcast, and this is a segment that we typically cover some nurse news. We talk about what's happening in the world of nursing and healthcare. And last week there was a lot of talk, a lot of things going around about the Department of Education not classifying nursing as a professional degree. It was excluded from their professional classification. So we're really going to dive deep into that. We're going to talk about that mostly today. First, I'm going to cover a couple, you know, other stories that came out that I think are just interesting or feel good or just things to touch on real quick. But this episode really is going to be dedicated to that Department of Education, the classification of professional degree for nursing, what that means, who it really affects. And yeah, let's I think it's caused a lot of fear, a lot of anger, a lot of just uncomfy feelings for a lot of people. Uh, I know that even I had made a post on my social media account that a lot of— I got a lot of backlash for. A lot of people saying, oh, you know, you didn't do your research. You don't know what you're talking about. This doesn't really affect you. And let's talk about it. You know, I think that when you put things out online, it is okay to have conversations, have disagreements. And I think it's actually healthy to look at the people who are saying things towards you that maybe are— make you feel a little icky inside, like, oh, maybe like what I said wasn't right. I think it's to a point. Obviously, some people just go way too far off the rails and can't keep it classy. But I think it's healthy to look inward and be like, okay, well, what did I say? What information did I put out there? Is this accurate? Do I know what I'm talking about? So yeah, we're going to chat about it. Okay, let's talk about this first. The headline for this is Fake Nurse with Notorious Kenyan Fraud Past Arrested After Working at US Hospice. So this person in November of this year. Christine Lewis is a 41-year-old Mesa, Arizona resident. Shout out, that's my home state. I lived in Mesa, I worked in Mesa. No, I don't know if I should be proud of that at this moment, but this person Christine was allegedly providing hospice care to vulnerable patients while using a stolen nursing license. Why? Why does this keep happening? How does this keep happening? How are people okay with this? I don't understand. Like, how are you using a nursing license and providing care to people, especially somebody who is actively dying, and then you go home and sleep at night knowing that you were doing things that you are not credentialed, not trained to do. This is not professional nursing if we're going to talk about professional nursing. But basically, she had gotten a job in Cottonwood, Arizona. They had noticed after doing some credentialing reviewing that there was a discrepancy, that the nursing license had been issued in 1980, which was 4 years before Miss Christine was born. So She knew about the, the review. She left that job. I don't know if she got fired or if she just left willingly, but then they had noted that she went and got another job in Mesa because she was working for a Northern Arizona company. And once that they saw that she got a position at the Golden Rose Hospice in Mesa, the company Northern Arizona did file a police report with the Cottonwood Police Department, launching the investigation with the Arizona Attorney General's office, and she was arrested. And now she's facing multiple felony charges including forgery, fraud schemes, practicing nurses with a— nursing with a fraudulent license, and computer tampering. In Arizona, this is a Class 4 felony, and you can serve a prison sentence of 2.5 years for first-time offenders. And due to her criminal history, which includes prior arrests for domestic battery in Las Vegas and fugitive from justice charges in Los Angeles. Doesn't look great for her. But you know what? You get, you get what you deserve, girl. If you're out there acting like a nurse, pretending to be a nurse, providing care to vulnerable populations, especially any population, but especially vulnerable dying people, girl, not good. It's not a good look. I'm just saying. Okay, we have to talk about this. @dr.jmac on Instagram shared this, this heartwarming reel and video. I was crying watching this. I just couldn't believe how sweet this is. Because I love, I love, love, love our environmental services employees. Anywhere that I've worked, I've always just, I've just loved them. I even remember I used to work for an athletic club in college and even our, our sweet lady there, she could hardly speak any English and she was just so sweet and she was such a hard worker. She cleaned her butt off. She was always moving. And that's how these environmental services employees are. They are just, they work so hard. They're constantly moving around and they do this work that goes so underappreciated. And so I always really tried to make it a point To look them in the eye, say thank you. Don't demand things of them, you know, just say thank you. It goes a long way. But when I worked at that athletic club, I just, I remember her so well. She was so sweet. And as you know, we couldn't communicate that well, but she had a little translator and we would sit there at the counter that I worked at the athletic club and we would just talk and she would teach me, like teach me little phrases in Spanish through her translator. But anyway, so sweet. This video by Dr. JMac, really, it does. Environmental Service employee Diego, who is working here in the United States, sends money home to his wife and daughter in Colombia. And he hadn't been home since last year, I think last December, if I'm not mistaken, from the video that I watched. And he was not able to get home this year just due to the increased financial strain, the cost of living, the cost of everything. As you know, it's insanely expensive to just live and be a human being. And so he couldn't get home. And so this The ER workers bought him a plane ticket to send him home for Christmas. This video is just so heartwarming. The doctor is just, you know, holding him by the shoulder, just telling him, "Hey, you know what? We banded together. We knew you couldn't get home. We bought you a plane ticket. You're going home to Colombia for some time in December." And the ER staff is just surrounding and cheering, and they all come in for a group hug. And this is the kind of news that we need. This is this is such a feel-good video. Go check it out. We can link it here. It's It's @dr.jmac on Instagram. Go check it out. It's really a heartwarming video.

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Okay. All right, let's do it. Let's dive into this, uh, Department of Education and what this means that nursing was excluded. As a professional degree by the Department of Education. So the U.S. Department of Education has officially excluded nursing in its recently revamped definition of professional degree programs. This change occurs as part of the implementation of President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act and has nursing organizations nationwide raising alarms. As of right now, these new measures are scheduled to be implemented starting July 1st, 2026, which by the way, how the hell is it already almost 2026? Okay, so who this really impacts, and this is where I got a lot of the pushback, a lot of the controversy on my own social media, was this impacts graduate nursing students. Okay, that's, that's nurse practitioner students, CRNA students. That's who it impacts. And this matters. It's important. And the post that I had made was a lot of pictures about, you know, me working as a nurse and why, you know, why are nursing— why is nursing not considered professional? And a lot of the backlash was like, yeah, you know, this is for graduate nurses, this is not for RNs, this is not for LPNs. Okay, listen, news alert to anybody out there listening, which I know any of you listening know this: nurse practitioners, CRNAs, are nurses. Okay, they have to start as a nurse. You have to be an RN, you have to be a registered nurse in order To be a nurse practitioner in order to be a CRNA. So I understand, okay, this is not affecting undergraduate nursing programs. Those are typically— typically those do not cost enough for you to need really the federal loan cap. That's what this exclusion of professional degree for nursing— so what this is doing is it is putting a cap on how much professional— they are professional, but graduate nursing degree Students can borrow as far as student loans. And what the Department of Education is saying is that basically under the act, certain graduate programs such as medicine, dentistry, law, and a handful of other high-cost degrees will qualify for a higher federal loan limit of $200,000. All other graduate and doctoral programs, including nursing, will fall under a $100,000 limit. Okay. The issue is these graduate nursing programs especially CRNA programs, are expensive. They are going to far exceed $100,000 to get a graduate professional nursing degree. And what the Department of Education is saying, which drives me insane, they have emphasized that this terminology is purely administrative. No, it is not. This language matters. This classification matters. Why else would you use a professional degree as the title for this, as the name for this, if it's clearly purely administrative. I don't buy that. I don't think that that is a correct way to put this information. So there basically— there's a myth that says that these changes will cause tuition to rise, and the Department of Education argues that the opposite will actually happen. So since 2007, graduate students have been allowed to borrow up to the full cost of attendance, something the department says encouraged institutions to increase tuition dramatically, even in fields with modest earning potential. The agency states the act's annual federal loan caps are already reining in inflated prices at graduate programs across the country. Okay, so here's, here's my thought on this. Okay, if this actually happened, if this was to actually happen and to end colleges and programs across the nation were to actually dramatically reduce the cost and the programs, great. I do not think this is going to happen. Okay, it might. I'm not saying it's impossible. I do not think this is going to happen. Really, these colleges, we've all gone to college if we're nurses. They've The price gouging is insane. The cost is insurmountable. Many people cannot afford to pay for this out of pocket. There's a reason that loans exist. There's a reason that we have to go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt to get these professional degrees. So I do not think that this is really going to force these schools to lower their tuition rates. I think this is just going to create more barriers for nurses to get these degrees, and this affects the entire healthcare system. That this is the issue. Nurse practitioners, PAs are on that list now of not— I don't know if they were on it before, but they are not classified as a professional degree. Physical therapy. This is so important. Nurse practitioners and PAs provide so much care, especially in rural areas where there's like a really major lack of providers. They can step in and they are people's primary care providers. They are in the perioperative space. They provide so much care. There's midwives. I don't think that there is enough emphasis on how much of a role nurse practitioners, PAs play in the role of a provider and specifically even a primary provider. We already have a huge shortage in this country. We already have a major issue with having enough healthcare personnel to take care of people. And now this is just another barrier. I think that the idea, okay, I will say this, the idea of lowering this or taking away this classification of a professional degree, causing or, you know, forcing these programs to lower their costs. It's a great idea, but is that actually going to happen in practice? That's the big question mark. And, you know, if that's the case, then what's the point? Why not with medicine degrees and law degrees too? Why aren't they trying to decrease the tuition rates for those? I don't understand that part, and maybe that's something that I, I need to look further into that I'm not fully understanding. But as it stands right now, that will go into place in July of 2026. There will be a cap on graduate nursing students obtaining federal loans for their program. This is an issue. People cannot afford to pay out of pocket for these degrees. Thus will lead to less people seeking graduate nursing degrees. So no, if you are a nursing student in an undergraduate program, if you are seeking an undergraduate degree, To get your bachelor's, your associate's degree in nursing, you are fine. It is there. These programs are typically not expensive enough anyway to need to borrow over $100,000. And so that is— I understand that those nurses are not being affected, but graduate nurses, nurse practitioners, CRNAs, this is who this is affecting. And this is a big deal. And we need to raise an alarm. We need to raise a red flag and we need to speak up about this. And that's why I really wanted to talk about that on today's podcast. So that is what I have for nurse news. If you want to hear more about this, I really recommend that you go to nurse.org/news. You can find the articles, you can read these articles about what's happening and with the Department of Education and the lack of what's happening in the Department of Education and the pulling back of the professional degree classification for nursing. There's detailed information in there. There's links that you can click to other outside articles, outside information. And I just think it's important to do the research to understand what is going on and at least just stay in the know with something this huge. So that is what I got for you this week on Nurse News. Again, my name is Colton Lord. You can find me on social media @NurseColton. You can also find me @ColtonAllenLord. And yeah, this is Club Nurse. This is Nurse News. Also, if you want to stay up to date with Club Nurse, follow us on Instagram @club.nurse and be sure to sign up for nurse.org newsletter so you get Email updates with all the up-to-date and breaking news. Follow @nurse_org on Instagram, and yeah, stay in the know. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for listening, and we will catch you guys next time. 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 social. @NurseDaddies or @ColtonLord17, 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.