The crackdown is getting serious:
Ohio doctor charged with deliberately giving 25 patients fatal doses of painkillers https://t.co/qGIL4mhDLG
— TIME (@TIME) June 5, 2019
Time:
An Ohio critical-care doctor was arrested and charged with murder Wednesday in the deaths of 25 hospital patients who authorities say were deliberately given overdoses of painkillers.
Dr. William Husel, who was fired from the Columbus-area Mount Carmel Health System in December and stripped of his medical license after the allegations came to light, turned himself in for an arraignment on 25 counts of murder.
Franklin County prosecutor Ron O’Brien said other medical staff who were interviewed were treated as witnesses, and he doesn’t anticipate anyone else will be charged.
The truly disturbing aspect of this story is that Husel’s lawyer insists that the intent was never to kill the patients. If that is the truth, then he is remarkably incompetent. If your physician isn’t aware of what does and does not constitute a potentially fatal dosage, then everybody is really rolling the dice when getting medical care.
Perhaps the attorney’s claim would be more plausible if it only happened to one or two patients. Twenty-five though?
The police interviewed some of the victims’ families and none of those they talked to thought Husel was giving their loved ones any kind of “mercy treatment.”
Husel’s earlier work at the Cleveland Clinic is being reviewed internally and thus far nothing unusual has been discovered. That seems to red-flag his work after that even more.
Mount Carmel has already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle just a few of the lawsuits.
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