Most of Wettlaufer’s stained record not reported to College
Of 44 times nurse erred, only 10 were disclosed
Less than a quarter of Elizabeth Wettlaufer’s lengthy record of incompetence was reported to the College of Nurses of Ontario when she was fired from a nursing home for putting the life of a resident at risk, a public inquiry has heard.
The college’s lawyer, Mark Sandler, noted that Wettlaufer’s employment record contained 44 instances when the registered nurse committed medication errors, or was disciplined or warned for incompetence. Yet only 10 were reported to the college, which regulates Ontario nurses, when Wettlaufer was fired in March 2014 from the Caressant Care home in Woodstock.
By then, Wettlaufer had already killed seven residents in her care and assaulted two others with overdoses of insulin. By the time she confessed, unprompted, to police in September 2016, Wettlaufer had killed eight people and assaulted or tried to kill six others. She continued to work, with an unblemished public record on the College of Nurses website, until she turned herself in.
Sandler suggested the college didn’t investigate Wettlaufer in 2014 because the termination report to the regulatory body didn’t provide a full picture of Wettlaufer’s history.
“It could leave a misleading impression” if a nurse’s full disciplinary history and medication errors isn’t reported to the college, Sandler said.
Helen Crombez, former director of nursing at Caressant, replied that administrators at the nursing home believed the 10 items noted in the termination report to the college would have been enough to spark an investigation on whether Wettlaufer was fit to continue practising. The termination report included three suspensions Wettlaufer received — for a total of 11 days — due to medication errors.
When a college official called Crombez in July 2014 to ask about Wettlaufer’s termination, Crombez described Wettlaufer as “very pleasant with residents,” and added that her medication errors didn’t cause “sustained harm to the residents,” according to notes of the conversation presented as evidence. The only negative comments noted about Wettlaufer were that staff “always complained” about her, and she refused to change the way she did her job.
“You certainly weren’t communicating to the college that she was unfit, incompetent, (or) incapable,” Sandler told Crombez, who was director of nursing at Caressant for more than 30 years.
The inquiry, headed by Commissioner Eileen Gillese, is examining how Wettlaufer could have left a trail of death and incompetence as a registered nurse for nine years without anyone stopping her before she finally turned herself in. Final recommendations are expected by July 2019. Crombez said she f elt “blessed” when Wettlaufer ap- plied for a job at Caressant in 2007.
“She was eager, she was happy, she was a minister’s daughter … She was a local girl,” Crombez testified. “I thought we were blessed to have her walk through the door.”
Crombez said she had no idea that Wettlaufer had been fired in 1995 while working at the Geraldton District Hospital, after she was found stumbling, slurring her speech and vomiting. She had taken large amounts of the anti-anxiety drug Ativan. Her union, the Ontario Nurses’ Association, filed a grievance over the firing and her employment record was amended to state that Wettlaufer had resigned of her own accord. The College of Nurses placed restrictions on her licence for a year.
Despite suspending and disciplining Wettlaufer numerous times, Crombez said she never thought Wettlaufer was unfit to be a nurse. In a 2013 assessment of Wettlaufer’s overall performance, Crombez gave Wettlaufer a rating of two out of a maximum four points. On the assessment form, Crombez wrote that Wettlaufer’s performance was “below what is expected.” But she also noted that Wettlaufer “cares deeply about residents.”