Nursing board ‘puts your family at risk,’ chief says | www.myajc.com

The president of the Georgia Board of Nursing declared Wednesday that his board cannot protect people from bad or drug-addicted nurses.

The board’s lengthy backlog of disciplinary cases “puts your family at risk,” Barry Cranfill, a nurse anesthetist appointed to the board in 2010, told state legislators. “We can’t do it with the resources we have now.”

Cranfill’s testimony came before a special House committee studying dozens of professional licensing boards to find ways to streamline their work. The boards, which fall under Secretary of State Brian Kemp, have struggled in recent years with smaller budgets and new responsibilities to ensure they do not issue licenses to illegal immigrants.

The nursing board, which regulates more than 150,000 nurses across the state, is the largest and perhaps most troubled of the boards. This summer The Atlanta Journal-Constitution spent weeks examining nurse disciplinary files and how the board deals with them.

The investigation found that the board takes an average of 15 months to handle disciplinary cases, creating a huge backlog of complaints and enabling nurses to continue treating patients while their cases languish. Most of the cases involve nurses who have been accused of stealing and abusing narcotics, often multiple times.

The board’s complaint system is so archaic that officials have a hard time even quantifying the backlog. Officially there are more than 3,300 open cases, but officials in Kemp’s office think that includes an unknown number closed cases that were never removed from the system.

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