Former Sask. nurse appeals to have $50K in misconduct charges overturned

A former Saskatchewan nurse fined $50,000 for professional misconduct may get a lesser penalty after a King's Bench judge quashed several findings of the disciplinary committee.

Jessica McCulloch was found guilty of nine misconduct charges by the College of Registered Nurses of Saskatchewan (CRNS) following a three-week disciplinary hearing in 2021 that was deemed the most expensive in the regulator's history.

• Get the CTV News app for Saskatchewan breaking news alerts and top stories 

McCulloch appealed to the Court of King's Bench to review the charges, including that she failed to account for missing narcotics, falsified narcotics records, brought contraband items into a corrections unit and that she finished a patient’s puzzle behind his back just to “piss him off.”

The accusations relate to incidents while she worked at the Regional Psychiatric Centre (RPC) in Saskatoon between 2015 and 2016 and North Battleford’s Saskatchewan Hospital from 2016 to 2019.

According to a September decision from Justice Donald Layh, McCulloch argued her breaches were trivial in nature and fell short of professional misconduct.

On two of the charges, Layh agreed.

McCulloch was accused of making Q-tips available to patients in 2019 at Saskatchewan Hospital, despite strict instructions not to bring outside items onto the unit.

“Ms. McCulloch testified that she brought Q-tips to the unit to clean the med cart and that she gave ‘one’ Q-tip to ‘a patient’ and that he or she used it ‘under supervision’ and that the patient gave the Q-tip back to her when he or she was done using it, and she put the Q-tip in the sharps,” Layh writes.

Layh said the committee’s findings implied that she carelessly handed out the items, but could not support that with evidence, and the rules at Sask. Hospital were unclear at the time.

“I find that Ms. McCulloch did exercise due diligence, particularly in light of the vagueness of the rules at the Sask. Hospital and, specifically, what items might constitute contraband.”

Layh also pointed to holes in the finding that McCulloch completed a puzzle while a patient slept just to “piss him off.”

He said there was a lack of clarity from the committee and the witnesses as to who, exactly, was the intended target of the action, and no effort to prove someone was actually aggrieved.

On this point, Layh says McCulloch was credible — she knew the patient in question and said he was aware she would continue the puzzle without him during her night shift.

 

DRUGS UNACCOUNTED FOR

Among perhaps the more troubling charges against McCulloch, Layh sided with the disciplinary committee.

The court upheld the findings that McCulloch failed to file the necessary paperwork or get another nurse to co-sign when she says she had to discard 40 Tylenol and Codeine tablets during a shift at RPC in 2015.

On another occasion at RPC, the committee said McCulloch signed the name of a correctional officer as a witness to a wasted dose of Dilaudid, although only medical staff were allowed to co-sign the document.

At the hearing, McCulloch said one of the inmates spilled a cup of apple sauce containing the drug, and she quickly wiped it up with a paper towel and dumped in a secure shredding bin.

She was unable to justify why she wrote the guard’s name as a witness, knowing he couldn’t attest to it, Layh said. The guard testified he never saw the spill and McCulloch never advised him about it.

McCulloch told court medication errors were a “regular occurrence at RPC.”

“When Ms. McCulloch advances this line of argument she fails to appreciate an important distinction between an ‘error’ and the conduct with which she has been charged and found guilty,” Layh wrote.

He says she admitted she knew the policies and procedures for drug wastage and didn’t follow them.

“These are not ‘errors.’ Understandably, the circumstances would be different if a drug has been mishandled by accident or mistake and where the nurse has been honest and forthright in explaining the situation.”

When McCulloch faced the disciplinary hearings in 2021, she stood accused of 21 charges, including stealing medication and contributing to the underground economy among the inmate population.

Her lawyer at the time told CTV News the proceedings were difficult for his client due to her severe PTSD.

In June 2011 at the RPC — just two years into her employment — McCulloch was taken hostage. An inmate came behind her, placed his arm around her neck and held a shank carved from a toilet brush up to her throat.

In her appeal, McCulloch argued the nursing regulator failed to consider how her mental health could have effected her performance.

The judge disagreed. He said the committee heard evidence from two experts and filed several medical reports as evidence.

“That is not to say that Ms. McCulloch’s mental health struggles are not material or relevant,” the regulator wrote in its disciplinary report, but it couldn’t establish a clear link between her mental illness and her conduct at work.

Because two of the misconduct findings have been overturned, the college of nurses will need to reassess the penalty, Justice Layn said.

-With files from Nicole Di Donato