In this Club Nurse podcast episode, host Colton Lord delivers a news‑style roundup of recent nursing‑related events. He begins with a promotion for nurse appreciation events partnered with major‑league sports teams offering discounted tickets. The main stories covered include: (1) a Maryland assisted‑living facility where a nurse raised concerns about a medication technician who later murdered an 87‑year‑old resident, highlighting whistleblower retaliation and patient safety failures; (2) an update on the proposed $100,000 H‑1B visa fee introduced under the Trump administration, its potential to worsen the nursing shortage, and a bipartisan bill (Physicians and Healthcare Workforce Act) seeking to exempt healthcare workers from the fee; (3) a violent incident in a Fresno clinic where a 69‑year‑old patient shot a female healthcare worker, underscoring growing violence against clinicians and prompting safety tips for nurses; and (4) a lawsuit by Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare to evict a patient who has remained in a hospital room for five months after discharge, illustrating case‑management and discharge‑planning challenges. Throughout, Lord intersperses personal commentary, calls for taking nurse warnings seriously, offers a practical safety tip (keep your back to the door), and promotes Nurse.org resources and social media channels.
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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. My name is Colton Lord, the host of the Club Nurse Podcast. If this is your first time, we really have been focusing a lot on bringing you news on the Club Nurse podcast news as in like healthcare nursing news things that are happening in the world of healthcare just to keep you up to date because I think it's important and I know that news kind of gets a bad rap and I understand that and I think consuming too much news really can be a bad thing but my intentions my goal here is really just to bring that information to the forefront for you give it to you and then you can do what you will with that if you want more information you always can go to nurse.org/news look further into these stories and dive kind of deeper into it but I'm just here to deliver the news, give you what's going on. You can listen to this on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here on nurse.org. All of these news episodes are embedded in the articles that you see through the nurse.org socials or on the website. This week, there's, there's really not a whole lot to cover, if I'm being totally honest. There were a few stories that caught my eye that I thought we could talk about. I'll be totally honest with you, a lot of them are— well, there's not that many, but the couple that I found are, of course, About violence against healthcare workers. So I think we can just talk about those. Well, actually, I guess actually technically this first one's not really violence against the healthcare worker, but there is a nurse that was involved in this case who raised the warning flags and of course got what sounds like kind of some retaliation and was fired, but they were correct. So let me talk to you about it. A nurse warned about assisted living worker before he allegedly killed a resident in his bed. Um, so a nurse At Coger of Potomac in Maryland emailed supervisors on February 3rd with concerns about a medication technician, Marquis James, alleging he sexually harassed a coworker, mishandled medications, and arrived to work intoxicated. The nurse was fired shortly after. James remained employed and allegedly shot and killed 87-year-old resident Robert Fuller Jr. on Valentine's Day. The lawsuit alleges that James' mother, Shanice James Dubose. Served as Koger's regional health and wellness director and used her position to suppress complaints about her son and discipline staff who raised concerns. This is insane. This is not good. And you know what? This just ties into the whole people and management and administrators and doctors even not listening to nurses. Take nurses seriously. When nurses are raising flags and they are noticing things, it's for a reason. Honestly, like, do you think any nurse wants to go out of their way to stir up drama or create any kind of target on their back? No, they don't. But you know what nurses do? They do care about the safety and wellbeing of the patients because that's what we are there for. That is our number one priority is the safety and wellbeing of the patients. And if something is jeopardizing that, we speak up. And when we speak up, there's retaliation. And you know what? Even when there's not direct retaliation, these things, you just know, you know, as the nurse, like when you say things and you step on the toes of management or a charge nurse or administrators or a doctor in the wrong way, these things come back to you. And there may be subtle ways that aren't necessarily traceable. That just like come back at you. This is obviously traceable. She has emails and she was fired. But I just, I don't like that. Does not sit well with me, uh, that this nurse had the courage to speak up and then she was retaliated against and then somebody lost their life. And the worst part about this story when I was reading it is the lawsuit points to a disturbing picture of what happened after Fuller's death. Investigators say James, the man who murdered the resident, who was the suspect in murdering the resident, tampered with the facility's security system and disabled alarms and was propping open exterior before the murder. But this is the most chilling part of the entire story. The resident's roommate there, or the same person that was in the same area— they have him in here as Buttrick— told investigators that she believed she knew the culprit. Multiple employees also identified James in security footage, and despite this, they continued to assign the suspect, Mr. James, as Buttrick's medication technician for 10 more days after The murder. They allowed him as a suspect. I don't know. I guess if he was technically a suspect at the time of the investigation, but she knew. Okay. The resident knew. She said she was required to receive medication from the hands of the man she identified to police as a suspect alone in her home, which was still a crime scene with zero protection. According to the suit, James would arrive alone at the apartment and spoon-feed medications mixed with applesauce to the elderly Parkinson's patient as she trembled with fear. This is terrible. Buttricks told. investigators she did not remember hearing the gunshot on the night of the killing despite normally being an extremely light sleeper. In quotes, she believes James intentionally overmedicated her beforehand. James was not arrested until February 24th when police say he fired at a Maryland state trooper during a traffic stop in Baltimore. He was charged with first-degree murder in Fuller's death and is facing attempted murder charges stemming from a separate Baltimore shooting. He's being held without bond at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility. And a preliminary hearing is scheduled for March 27th. Insane. That story is insane. I don't like that.
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Uh, okay, on to the next. So Trump's $1,000 visa fee could worsen nursing shortage. We had talked about this before. I covered this in a previous episode. We update on this. Um, our last update was in December. Um, so for the March update, for anyone who doesn't know, this is a proposed $100,000 H-1B visa fee that would make it significantly harder for US healthcare systems to recruit international nurses and clinicians. So a new bipartisan bill introduced in Congress could ease some of the workforce concerns tied to the $100,000 H-1B visa fee for healthcare professionals. The Physicians and Healthcare Workforce Act introduced on March 17th to 26th would exempt physicians and other healthcare workers from the fee and prevent additional increases. The American Medical Association voiced strong support for the legislation, emphasizing it's important for maintaining patient access to care. So yeah, the AMA basically warned that this huge fee would just make it harder for healthcare systems to recruit clinicians, particularly in underserved and rural areas where international providers are often essential. So that's the update on that Trump bill of the $100,000 fee that's going to be charged to the H-1B visas, which is wild, but we won't get into that. Oh my gosh. Okay, so let's go into this. Another violent act against healthcare worker. Uh, patient shot healthcare worker inside a clinic, faces attempted murder charges. So this was a 69-year-old patient who shot a healthcare worker multiple times. In an exam room. This was in Fresno, California on March 5th. The suspect was arrested at the scene and faces 4 felony charges. The victim, which is a woman in her 30s, she survived after having emergency surgery. She has not been identified publicly. She was in critical condition, but she has since then been released from the hospital. There were nearly 40 other people inside the clinic at the time. No one else was hurt. And again, this just adds to the The growing concerns of violence, violent acts against healthcare workers. I think it's, again, until you're in the situation, it is actually terrifying when you realize how little protection that there is in a hospital. And last week we did talk about the California legislation that is getting metal detectors in the emergency room, labor and delivery, and the main areas of the hospital. So I think that's really great. It's a great step, but I can't believe this is only happening now. Like, it is absolutely so scary to be in a situation where you're like, somebody's obviously very upset with me right now. I've had moments where I just feel like something is off. The vibe is off. Like something, like something is weird about this. I'm kind of scared that they're gonna pull out a weapon. And you are, you're defenseless. You have nothing. And like, what are you supposed to do in a situation when you're in a room? Any new nurses out there listening, you should be learning this in nursing school, but I'll give you a tip right now. If you are ever going into a room Especially with someone that you feel may be high risk for attacking you or a psych patient, you better never have your back into a corner of the room. You better always have your back to the door and the patient over there. So patient, you, door. That's how it should always be. You don't ever wanna be to where you are trapped in a room. It is an extremely high safety risk. So that is my nursing tip for the day. Okay, let's talk about this. Patient refuses to leave hospital room five months after discharge. Girl, are you serious? This is crazy. The hospital is suing. This is Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare filed a lawsuit in early March to evict a patient who has refused to leave her hospital room since being formally discharged on October twenty October six thousand twenty-five. Girl, this is insane. This is wild. I mean, we all know what this is causing, like just the the cost, the burden on the healthcare workers. I don't know the situation. I'm gonna try not to judge the patient. But it says that the family's been involved and they've tried everything that they possibly can to, you know, help safely discharge this patient. But I really don't understand, like, oh my God, there must be— this must be a case management nightmare. Let's just do a shout out to our case managers out there because I know you and those social workers are doing everything you possibly can to help get this patient out. I know, I don't know. I mean, this is— that's so hard. I mean, again, as a nurse, there's like the part of like where you are the patient advocate, you want to do everything you can for the patients, but girl, you can't be just staying past your discharge for That's crazy. I've never heard of anything like this in my life. But wow, I can't even— I don't even know what to say. I am a little bit speechless about this, but I'll be interested. We'll keep you guys updated on what the lawsuit— what ends up happening and if the patient ends up having to leave. Or I don't understand because like I said, it says family's been involved, and so why can't they take them? I don't know. You know what, I'm not even going to try to know because I, I know how discharge planning goes. I understand there's so many different dynamics into, into these things and social aspects. And finances, and I, I'm not going to judge. I just am curious on how this is going to turn out. I didn't realize patients could just stay though. If they were discharged, you know, I would assume security would end up just coming to escort them out. But again, there must be some nuances to this case that make it maybe to where they literally cannot obviously discharge safely. I don't know. This is wild to me. So we will keep you guys updated on that. That's really it for the week, guys. There really was not a whole lot of news for me to cover. Um, those are, those are the main stories I wanted to touch on. We'll keep you guys updated on things. And like I said, keep your eyes and ears out for the Club Nurse Podcast. We're gonna be having some guests on talking about some pretty cool topics, some interesting topics, things that I think you will find valuable and interesting. As always, you can find these articles on nurse.org/news. That's where we post all of these articles in depth with details and links to everything. Find us on socials. It's nurse_org. Uh, on Instagram, you can find me @nursecolton, uh, as well. And yeah. Thank you guys so much for listening. I hope you have a wonderful week and we will chat soon.
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 @NurseDaddies or @ColtonLord17, and be sure to follow nurse.org to stay informed with all of the hottest healthcare topics. Until Until next time, take care of yourself the way you take care of everyone else. Love ya. Bye.
