Discipline hearing for serial killer puts college of nurses under fire

What’s the point?

Imprisoned after murdering eight Southwestern Ontario nursing home residents, former nurse Elizabeth Wettlaufer faces a professional discipline hearing Tuesday for her killing spree and other crimes.

She’s already behind bars, she’s surrendered her nursing licence.

While the College of Nurses of Ontario is moving to close the file on the worst serial killer in Canadian health-care history, critics wonder where it was three years ago when Wettlaufer was fired from the Woodstock nursing home where she murdered seven people with insulin overdoses, only to be hired by another home in London, Meadow Park, where she went on to kill her final victim.

“Sure, have the hearing now. But the time to have it would have been immediately after she was dismissed for (allegedly making) medication errors,” Wanda Morris of CARP, the Canadian Association of Retired Persons, said Monday.

“We need to take it up a level to say, ‘Why the heck didn’t this hearing happen earlier?’ ”

How Wettlaufer’s crimes — eight first-degree murders over seven years, four attempted murders and two counts of aggravated assault, all involving elderly people in her care — could have gone on for so long, without being stopped, is concerning to Morris.

She said a life could have been saved if the nurses college had acted when Wettlaufer was terminated in March 2014 at the Caressant Care nursing home in Woodstock, where, according to court documents obtained for a search warrant in the criminal investigation, she was fired amid allegations of repeated medication-related errors.

“This is something that should have happened within three months, not more than three years.”

The regulator began its investigation on Sept. 30, 2016, the same day Wettlaufer resigned her membership and told the regulatory agency of her actions, said director of communications Deborah Jones.

“Given that serious criminal charges were pending, our priority was to avoid interfering with the criminal process,” she wrote in an email.

When Wettlaufer pleaded guilty to all the criminal charges on June 1, the college “accelerated its investigation” and issued a disciplinary notice just three days before the ex-nurse was sentenced.

Even with Wettlaufer’s convictions, her life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years and voluntarily surrendering her licence, Jones said the college needs to officially bar her from the nursing profession.

“While this may appear redundant, it is important from a systemic point of view,” she said.

The college, in its notice for Tuesday’s hearing, alleges Wettlaufer verbally, physically or emotionally abused 14 patients and engaged in “disgraceful, dishonourable or unprofessional conduct,” including by intentionally killing eight people with insulin overdoses.

If the college finds Wettlaufer guilty, it could bar her from ever practising nursing in Ontario again or slap her with a maximum $35,000 fine.

Wettlaufer could also be on the hook for the college’s legal expenses, investigation and hearing costs.

Due process or not, the timing of the college’s disciplinary move isn’t good enough for Queen’s Park critics, who say the regulator needs to come clean about why action against Wettlaufer took so long.

“When Wettlaufer left her first place of employment there should have been flags all over to go to the next place of employment,” said Bill Walker, the Progressive Conservative long-term care critic.

“That should have been on her record,” said the Bruce-GreyOwen Sound MPP. “The college, in my mind, should have been all over this.”

Walker said he hopes more answers will come out when a public inquiry — promised by Ontario’s Liberal government the same day Wettlaufer was sentenced — gets underway.

The timeline, details and scope of the investigation — and who will lead it — haven’t yet been released.

Though she said she’s concerned about the college’s oversight, Ontario New Democrat seniors’ affairs critic Teresa Armstrong said she hopes the inquiry will give the public the answers they deserve.

“For families that have lost loved ones, the hearing is coming a little too late. But I think that’s why the inquiry is the right thing to do,” said the London-Fanshawe MPP.

“From there, we’ll go forward and get a broader look into the systemic issues that are plaguing long-term care.”