Registered Nurse Is Caught in an Unhealthy Situation

I’m a registered nurse specializing in home-care nursing and I love my work, but the worst period of my life was the year I spent with one home-care agency. Almost from the day I was hired as a supervisor, I saw things that amazed and appalled me. These ranged from nurses reporting that they’d spent time with a patient when they actually hadn’t, to the agency submitting fraudulent bills to Medicare.

At first, I simply couldn’t believe that these things were actually happening. My disbelief was reinforced when the company was visited by a regulatory agency that found nothing wrong.

Then, after I finally accepted that bad things were happening, I couldn’t actually prove it. The community this agency served spoke a language different from mine, so I couldn’t check facts with the patients directly, and the culture of the agency itself wasn’t my own, so in many cases I didn’t even know how to frame my questions.

I finally decided that I just had to confront the owners. Since I knew that I’d get emotional during this meeting, I made a list of the points I wanted to cover. I was very glad to have it because the meeting didn’t go the way I’d planned. The first unpleasant surprise was that the owners already knew about these problems. Their position, however, was that only two or three employees were involved and that their illegal activities were random occurrences.

The second ugly surprise was that they attempted to buy me by promising me future promotions and larger wages if I stayed. Since I hadn’t gone into the meeting intending to quit, I again needed some time to consider what I should do.

Three days later, after realizing that there was nothing I could do to change the situation, I resigned.