Four nurses at a hospital in Georgia have accused the facility of falsifying coronavirus test results, to minimize the scale of the outbreak and keep their hospital open.
The unnamed medical workers filed a lawsuit against the Landmark Hospital in Athens, Georgia, seeking a restraining order and injunction.
The documents, filed on Wednesday at Gwinnett County Superior Court in Lawrenceville, accuse the hospital of ‘concealing and mishandling a COVID-19 outbreak at the facility’.
The four employees claim that the hospital engineered the scheme to keep the hospital open.
Landmark Hospital in Athens, Georgia, has been accused of falsifying COVID-19 test results
‘Landmark fabricated negative results so as to continue to be able to discharge patients to make space for new admissions and avoid the negative publicity and oversight that would result if the positive COVID-19 results were disclosed,’ the court documents state.
The 42-bed critical care facility received $600,000 under the CARES Act to support its coronavirus treatment program, the documents claim.
Accepting the money binds the facility to the CDC’s testing protocols.
‘This is based on greed,’ one of the nurses told Georgia Health News.
‘It’s not about the patients. It’s not about the staff — we’re not afraid of COVID-19, but we don’t want to spread it to other patients.
‘We want to isolate and treat it appropriately.’
Five patients admitted to the hospital tested positive for COVID-19 between June 4-8, the documents state.
The nurses claim that ‘after learning of the positive results, Landmark undertook a scheme to purposefully create false negative COVID-19 results.’
The hospital allegedly misled the laboratory by submitting samples from the tracheal area, instead of the recommended nasal swabs. The trachea samples were placed on nasal swabs
Georgia is one of several states seeing its number of confirmed cases continue to rise
Landmark prevented nurses from administering tests, and allowed only one administrator to perform the procedure.
They claimed the five known cases were false positives, and started using a test which was not approved by the CDC.
They would take samples from the trachea, rather than the nasal passages, but present them on nasal swabs to indicate the specimen had come from the nose area.
The specimens would be marked ‘Nasal COVID-19’, despite being from the wind pipe.
The four nurses claim that they and others confronted management, and showed them the CDC guidelines, but were punished as a result.
‘The employees have been intimidated and shunned by Landmark administration due to raising concerns,’ they state in the documents.
Nurses who correctly performed the tests have lost their jobs, they claim.
The United States has 2.2 million coronavirus cases, as of 5pm on June 19
Nurses who correctly performed tests were fired, court documents filed Wednesday claim
Nurses who kept their jobs were not given sufficient personal protective equipment (PPE), they allege.
Furthermore, they maintain that COVID-19 is currently spreading throughout the facility because the air conditioning system is faulty, and the hospital does not have the required negative pressure room to stop contamination.
They say that one patient has already been transferred back to a nursing home, putting other residents at risk. Others have been wrongly sent home.
‘When they had someone who would turn out positive, they would re-do the test so it would come back negative – and they would say it was a false positive,’ one of the plaintiffs told 11 Alive.
A second nurse added: ‘Once our testing, the proper way, started coming back positive, we then weren’t allowed to take samples any longer.’
Another nurse said they were fired for correctly performing the test.
‘I did the test, and it did turn out positive, and I was terminated for not having a doctor’s order for the test,’ the nurse claimed.
Marie Saylor, CEO of the hospital, said they would ‘vigorously investigate allegations and defend our hospital and its staff against misleading and false claims.’
She continued: ‘We have always made the safety and well-being of our patients and staff our top priority, and continue to do so as we manage the local impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.’