California Employment Law: Retaliation Against Nurses

One of the unfortunate work related violations in California hospital, clinics and other healthcare facilities is the retaliation against nurses for complaining about patient safety or violations by doctors or other staff. Imagine a nurse files a complaint or contacts a state agency with concerns about how her facility treats patients or how certain doctors perform their duties. An internal or an outside investigator is brought to look into the issue, interviewing the complaining nurse and the doctors mentioned in the complaint.

Although it would be completely illegal, it is almost natural for a doctor to feel like the lower-ranked nurse is trying to jeopardize the doctor's status and even employment at that healthcare facility. The doctor then might try to retaliated against the nurse by trying to get her in trouble. This can be done by reporting the most minor violations of that nurse or looking for charting errors in that nurses charts or making a complaint against that nurses with abstract and highly subjective issues, such as insubordination, etc... 

If you are about to complain about a certain health and safety violation or patient care violation at your healthcare facility, it is important that you are aware of a number of other retaliation issues before you move forward to make sure that you know how to prevent or how to deal best with retaliation and/or how to preserve the option of being able to file a retaliation lawsuit later if and when you need to do so.

---