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A 48-year old Duval County woman was arrested today on two counts of practicing as a Health Care Professional without an active, valid Florida License. The suspect, identified as Amy Suzanne Pohlman, 48, 4515 Ortega Farms Cr., was booked into the County Jail on $50,000 bond.

The suspect, who claimed to be a registered nurse, to have a PhD, and claimed she was an Advanced Registered Nurse Practitioner (ARNP), had been hired as Nurse Administrator for a Ponte Vedra Beach company (Ponte Vedra Home Care) in October 2015. The suspect had documents alleging she had a nursing license at the time. Her duties included writing up care plans, visit clients and assist with the company’s marketing. As she became familiar with more clients, she offered nursing care independently as a Care Manager.

Last June company officials became suspicious after attempting to determine if the suspect’s nursing license was still valid, couldn’t find that she was licensed and notified the Department of Health. At the time the suspect resigned from her position from the company and the investigation began.

Detectives with the Sheriff’s Office Special Victims’ Unit (SVU) along with the assistance from a medical investigator from the Jacksonville Office of the Florida Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit took over the investigation in September and discovered that the suspect had signed a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order and created a fake ARNP license. She is also charged with performing a physical exam on an applicant of the home care company.

The investigation revealed that the suspect did not have a Doctorate of Philosophy of Physiology degree that she claimed, nor did she have a Master’s or any other degree in Nursing. Detectives also located an award type plaque that was displayed in her office from the Trustees of the Mayo Clinic: Alzheimer’s disease Research Center, issued on March 9, 2016 in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was determined that there was no such award given by the Mayo Clinic and investigators found that the suspect ordered and paid for the plaque which was created at a local awards/ trophy business in Jacksonville.

Additional charges are pending further investigation. Anyone that may have come in contact with the suspect on a professional basis is asked to contact SVU Detective David Rosado at the Sheriff’s Office at (904) 209-2161.

Okay, this is like the worst hair day of all time. Yesterday, a photo of a woman sitting in an Eastern European hospital waiting room started circulating around the Internet. According to the reports, she accidently mistook builders’ foam for hair mousse. Yes, now she has a big ol’ helmet of polyurethane foam on her head. That was all the information given surrounding this photo, then again if a picture paints a thousand words, this one could be summed up in far fewer.

Now if you look carefully at the photo, you’ll notice some leaves and twigs in the foam. Perhaps there is more to the story than what’s being passed around on the Interwebs? I can’t say.

In a frenzied doctor shopping spree, a Florida woman was transported by ambulance to seven different hospitals in a 26-hour period in a bid to obtain prescription pain medication, according to police who arrested her for misuse of the 911 system.

Investigators charge that Kimberly Keener, 40, repeatedly called 911 for transport to hospitals in Pinellas County. Beginning early Thursday morning, Keener, a Bradenton resident, was brought to seven separate hospitals by Sunstar Paramedics, which provides ambulance services in Pinellas County.

Keener sought to “obtain fraudulent prescription pain medication,” according to an arrest affidavit. Court filings do not indicate what maladies Keener claimed as she repeatedly called 911, or whether her scheme was a success.

Pictured above, Keener was arrested around 4 AM Friday at St. Petersburg General Hospital, final stop on her 2017 Pill Tour.

Keener, who reportedly admitted to the scheme, was charged with misuse of the 911 system and obtaining controlled substances by fraud, a felony. Locked up on $5150 bond in the county jail, Keener is also facing a probation violation rap in connection with a misdemeanor theft conviction from late-January.

SPRINGFIELD TOWNSHIP, OH – A 75-year-old woman had to be was rescued from her Springfield Twp. home on Thursday night, after being unable to leave her living room chair for possibly close to a year.

According to a Lucas County Sheriff’s report, the fire department arrived at her home on Burnham Green around 6:30 p.m. on Thursday night to find Barbara Foster surrounded by feces and urine and her skin molded to her chair.

A volunteer for a local church who had been delivering food to Ms. Foster for the past ten years had called 911 when he found her “not acting herself”.

He also said he had not seen Foster anywhere but in her chair since July of 2016 and the smell was how the home normally smelled.

Fire and rescue had to wear haz-mat suits just to enter the home.

According to the sheriff’s report, the odor was so strong it reached all the way to the front sidewalk.

The woman was heard screaming in pain as she was removed from her chair and taken to the hospital.

According to first responders,”bones in her body were breaking as EMS tried to carry her out of the house.”

Christopher Duntsch’s case is perhaps unique to the justice system—it’s incredibly rare for a surgeon to be indicted, much less convicted, for the care he or she provided.

A North Texas doctor accused of botching surgeries on purpose was found guilty Tuesday by a jury in Dallas of intentionally injuring a patient.

Christopher Duntsch practiced at hospitals in Dallas and Collin counties.

He was found guilty of intentionally injuring Mary Efurd, 74, in a spinal surgery in 2012 that nearly killed her. Efurd now uses a wheelchair and says she has never been the same after that surgery.

Duntsch is also accused of maiming and killing patients during other botched spinal surgeries. His medical license was revoked in 2013 and in 2015 he was arrested.

Jurors in the case heard several patients testify about their physical limitations post Duntsch’s surgical procedures.

Duntsch did not testify in his own defense in the trial, which lasted more than two weeks. Efurd described the emotions she felt immediately before the verdict was read.

“I was tense, very tense,” she said. “We were hoping for a quick verdict, and actually I think this was a quick verdict. And I was thinking all those things going through my mind and everything happening to me and all the others.”

The penalty phase will resume first thing Wednesday morning and testimony is expected through Friday. Duntsch could face life in prison.

Regarding “Bill seeks to improve access to health care” (Point of View, Feb. 10): Advance practice nurses are an undeniably crucial part of the health care team. But the simple fact of the matter is that they do not possess the same level of training and clinical expertise as a physician, who will have more than 10,000 hours of clinical training before finishing a residency program.

Additionally, numerous studies have shown that patients prefer — and have better health outcomes — when their care is provided in a team-based setting with their primary physician coordinating care by other providers. House Bill 1013 would fragment that health care system and make it less likely that important conversations will be had regarding patient care.

Supporters of the HB 1013 would have us believe this is a quick fix for our rural health care shortage. It’s a doubtful proposition that nurse practitioners will flock to rural areas should this bill pass but, even if we believed that would happen, are we OK with creating a two-tier health care system in which urban residents receive one standard of care while rural citizens get another?

There is no easy solution for our state’s health care shortage. But any proposed solution must always put the patient first. The Patients First Coalition was formed with one goal in mind — to promote patient safety. The safety net provided by current law has worked well to protect the safety of Oklahoma patients and is worth keeping in place.

Although we certainly must work to address health care shortages, HB 1013 is not the best way forward for Oklahoma.

Baker is president of the Oklahoma State Medical Association. Pitman is president of the Oklahoma Osteopathic Association. The Patients First Coalition represents their organizations and seven others in Oklahoma.

When Angela Ihegboro first saw her newborn daughter, she was “speechless.”

“She’s a miracle baby,” the 35-year-old mother said yesterday. “But still, what on Earth happened here?”

What happened is that baby Nmachi is a blond, blue-eyed white baby born to two black Nigerian immigrant parents at a London hospital.

“The first thing I said was, ‘What the flip?’ ” said the father, Ben Ihegboro. “We both just sat there after the birth staring at her for ages — not saying anything.”

He quickly sought to dispel any speculation.

“Of course she is mine. My wife is true to me,” the 44-year-old customer service adviser said. “Even if she hadn’t been, the baby still wouldn’t look like that.”

Genetics experts don’t believe in miracles, but they didn’t have any simple answers to the mystery of baby Nmachi. Instead, they offered three theories:

• She’s the result of a gene mutation unique to her. If that is the case, Nmachi would pass the gene to her children — and they, too, would likely be white.
• She’s the product of long-dormant white genes, passed on to her by her parents, that might have been carried by their predecessors for generations without surfacing until now.
• While doctors have said Nmachi is not an outright albino, or lacking in all pigment, they added that the child may have some kind of mutated version of the genetic condition — and that her skin could darken over time.

Hello, fellow struggling nursing student. I completely understand that you feel discouraged, hopeless, and beat down by nursing school. I am right where you are and I want you to know that are one of many students who have been beat down by the big, bad monster that is nursing school. People only see the tip of the iceberg that is success in nursing. They do not know about the part of the iceberg under the water that is the hard work, risks, late nights studying, failures, persistence, clinicals, exhaustion, doubts, failures, doubts, and hard work that it takes to become a nurse. I want you to know that I understand the full ice berg because I am struggling and I know stories of many successful nurses that have been practicing as a nurse for a long time. You can encounter a set back one thousand times and it would not stop you.

I have been beat down twice so far and I’m going back for a third round next month. The first time that I faced a trial, it was when my depression stopped me from being able to go to classes. My parents were starting to split up and I could barely get out of bed some days, so forget going to classes or studying. I was doing prereqs at the time. The second time that I faced a trial was just this semester when I had a trouble passing a test to get to my second rotation of clinicals. The test was to determine how well I know how to figure dosages of medications. I failed it seven times. I had to drop out my nursing class because I was not able to get to my second rotation of clinicals with a one hundred percent on the dosage calculation test. I had failed in an epic fashion and I was so embarrassed. But, I refuse to let my trials stop me from achieving my dream and I hope that you will have the same determination and will power. You want to cry? Let it out. You’re stressed? Work it out. You feel tired? Grind it out. The one thing that you can never do is quit.

So, I hope that hearing about another nursing students trials is what you need to gather your strength and keep giving it all you got. I hope that you climb the mountain that is nursing school and that you get to beam with pride when you get to sign RN behind your name for the rest of your life. I hope that you know that I believe in you.

Love,
Haleigh’s

Remember why you chose this path

Dear Nursing student,

Second semester has just begun, but as a fellow Nursing student, I know that you are already swamped with tons of homework, exams, classes, clinical, labs, and studying. Whether you are the pre-nursing student trying to pass Anatomy & Physiology, Chemistry, Statistic, and any other gen-ed requirement, to the Nursing student already in the program, you might be finding that second semester is bringing a heavy load.

You can already see yourself sitting in the library for endless hours this semester because you know it’s going to be a rough one. You can already feel the stress you are going to feel when you have 2 papers and 3 exams all in the same week. Second semester is already starting to make you feel like you don’t know if you can handle another hard semester.

You see your friends in other majors barely having any homework and you get envious. You wish you had more free time. You might not admit to it, but I bet sometimes you even wish you hadn’t chosen Nursing as your major….

Here is some advice for you little nursing student: You can do this. You chose to pursue a degree in nursing for a reason. Every time you start to resent your decision, remember why you chose this wonderful career path.

Remember how passionate you are about this field of work. Think about how someday you will help someone feel better when they are sick. You will show your compassion and dedication one day. One dy, you will impact a patient’s life. Think about it, you can do this.

I wish you nothing but the best this semester. All the late nights in the library and the stress will all be worth it one day, I promise.

Love,

A fellow struggling Nursing student

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