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FRANKFURT – Niels Hoegel the German nurse serving a prison sentence for murdering two patients is suspected of killing a total of 102 people, more than previously known, police and public prosecutors said on Thursday.
That would make him Germany’s deadliest serial killer if he was found guilty.
The man, identified only as Niels H. under reporting rules, has admitted to deliberately injecting patients at two clinics in northern Germany with deadly drugs and then trying to revive them in order to play the hero.
He has confessed to some killings, but police said in August that he could not remember all the details of his actions, prompting them to exhume the remains of 134 people with links to Niels H. to identify further victims.
The investigation has now turned up evidence leading authorities to suspect Niels H. killed 38 people at a clinic in the northern German city of Oldenburg and 62 at one in nearby Delmenhorst, Oldenburg police and the city’s public prosecutor’s office said in a statement on Thursday.
That is in addition to two counts of murder for which an Oldenburg court sentenced him in 2015.
Police said in August he was suspected of killing 84 other people in addition to those two and that the toll may rise as toxicology reports were examined.

It could rise further still, the statement said on Thursday, as police were seeking for the remains of some people to be exhumed in Turkey.
It said the prosecutor’s office was likely to bring charges against Niels H. early next year.
Ten years ago, a German nurse was convicted of killing 28 elderly patients. He said he gave them lethal injections because he felt sorry for them. He was sentenced to life in prison.
In Britain, Dr Harold Shipman was believed to have killed as many as 250 people, most of them elderly and middle-aged women who were his patients. Known as “Dr Death”, Shipman was sentenced to 15 life terms in 2000; he died in prison in 2004, apparently a suicide.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Raquel Hayes had many fooled for years, pretending to be an elementary school nurse from Clover, South Carolina.

That’s because authorities in Memphis say she took a nurse’s license from a stranger with the same first name and used it to get jobs at several healthcare facilities between June 2013 and July 2015, according to WREG.

Then Raquel Avore – the real nurse in South Carolina – got a call from authorities in Memphis.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Avore said. “How did this happen? How does someone use a nursing license that’s specifically mine?”

Hayes’ attorney said his client even got a job at Fertility Associates of Memphis.

WREG called their offices several times to find out what Hayes did at the clinic, but was told the office administrator is the only person who could talk the media and she wasn’t at work.

Tennessee’s nursing board director says “employers have the responsibility to verify and continuously monitor the licensure status”

It’s unclear if the clinic could face disciplinary action.

Authorities got a tip about Hayes, which launched their investigation. She pleaded guilty to identity theft and impersonating a licensed professional Monday and received two years probation.

A former nurse who prosecutors believe could be responsible for the deaths of up to 60 Texas children has been indicted on a murder charge for the fifth time this year.

Bexar County District Attorney Nico LaHood says a grand jury indicted Genene Jones on a murder charge Tuesday in the 1981 death of a 3-month-old.

The 67-year-old Jones already is in state prison for the 1982 killing of a toddler and the sickening of a 4-week-old boy who survived.

She was scheduled for release in March.

LaHood says authorities want to hold Jones “accountable for as many children’s deaths as the evidence will support.”

Authorities have linked Jones to the deaths of children during or shortly after her shifts at a San Antonio hospital and a medical clinic in the region.

A Utah nurse who was arrested for refusing to let a police officer draw blood from an unconscious patient settled Tuesday with Salt Lake City and the university that runs the hospital for $500,000. Nurse Alex Wubbels and her lawyer, Karra Porter, announced the move nearly two months after they released police body-camera video showing Detective Jeff Payne handcuffing Wubbels, the AP reports. The footage drew widespread attention online amid the national debate about police use of force. The settlement covers all possible defendants in a lawsuit, including individual police officers, university police, and hospital security guards. The payout will be divided among the city and the University of Utah.

Wubbels plans to use part of the money to fund legal help for others trying to get similar body-camera video. She says that in cases like hers, video is essential to being heard and believed. “We all deserve to know the truth, and the truth comes when you see the actual raw footage, and that’s what happened in my case,” she says. “No matter how truthful I was in telling my story, it was nothing compared to what people saw and the visceral reaction people experienced when watching the footage.” She says she also plans to donate to a nurse’s union and help lead a campaign to stop physical and verbal abuse of nurses on the job. (Payne has been fired and his supervisor has been demoted.)

A Utah nurse who was arrested for refusing to let a police officer draw blood from an unconscious patient settled Tuesday with Salt Lake City and the university that runs the hospital for $500,000. Nurse Alex Wubbels and her lawyer, Karra Porter, announced the move nearly two months after they released police body-camera video showing Detective Jeff Payne handcuffing Wubbels, the AP reports. The footage drew widespread attention online amid the national debate about police use of force. The settlement covers all possible defendants in a lawsuit, including individual police officers, university police, and hospital security guards. The payout will be divided among the city and the University of Utah.

Wubbels plans to use part of the money to fund legal help for others trying to get similar body-camera video. She says that in cases like hers, video is essential to being heard and believed. “We all deserve to know the truth, and the truth comes when you see the actual raw footage, and that’s what happened in my case,” she says. “No matter how truthful I was in telling my story, it was nothing compared to what people saw and the visceral reaction people experienced when watching the footage.” She says she also plans to donate to a nurse’s union and help lead a campaign to stop physical and verbal abuse of nurses on the job. (Payne has been fired and his supervisor has been demoted.)

A Utah nurse who was arrested for refusing to let a police officer draw blood from an unconscious patient settled Tuesday with Salt Lake City and the university that runs the hospital for $500,000. Nurse Alex Wubbels and her lawyer, Karra Porter, announced the move nearly two months after they released police body-camera video showing Detective Jeff Payne handcuffing Wubbels, the AP reports. The footage drew widespread attention online amid the national debate about police use of force. The settlement covers all possible defendants in a lawsuit, including individual police officers, university police, and hospital security guards. The payout will be divided among the city and the University of Utah.

Wubbels plans to use part of the money to fund legal help for others trying to get similar body-camera video. She says that in cases like hers, video is essential to being heard and believed. “We all deserve to know the truth, and the truth comes when you see the actual raw footage, and that’s what happened in my case,” she says. “No matter how truthful I was in telling my story, it was nothing compared to what people saw and the visceral reaction people experienced when watching the footage.” She says she also plans to donate to a nurse’s union and help lead a campaign to stop physical and verbal abuse of nurses on the job. (Payne has been fired and his supervisor has been demoted.)

ANDOVER, Massachusetts — A puppy in Massachusetts had to be given a live-saving drug after an accidental overdose.

Peter Thibault was walking his 3-month-old dog, Zoey, in Andover last Friday, when she stuck her nose in cigarette box.

It turned out an opioid was inside and the yellow lab soon lost consciousness.

Thibault rushed her to a veterinary hospital, where doctors used several doses of Narcan to reverse the effects.

Zoey has since recovered.

“It could have been one of the kids in the neighborhood and that would have been devastating, little kids out here all the time,” Thibault said.

President Trump declared the opioid epidemic a nationwide public health emergency on Thursday.

GULFPORT, MISS. A hospital on Mississippi’s gulf coast is changing its emergency room treatment policy in an effort to ease crowding.

The Sun Herald reports Memorial Hospital at Gulfport beginning next month will try to address the crowding issue by trying to convince “non-urgent” patients to go to a walk-in clinic. Such patients who insist on using the ER will be asked to pay a $200 deposit or their insurance co-pay before they are treated.

A press release from the hospital said qualified ER providers will determine who is a non-urgent patient.

Officials at the hospital said the change in policy is not a cost-saving measure nor does it alter Memorial’s commitment to serve people who are unable to pay for health care.

“Memorial, like all hospitals, have an obligation to provide care for acute (inpatient) and emergent conditions without regard to a patient’s ability to pay,” said Memorial President/CEO Gary G. Marchand. “The new financial policy does not conflict with the hospital’s obligation to treat acute and emergent conditions. Acute and emergent conditions are exceptions to the new financial policy.”

The hospital said it has seen an increase from 9,000 a year to 13,000 a year in hospital admissions from the ER for people with severe illnesses or injuries. It suggests people with fever, colds and flu, ear infections, rashes and burns, insect bites, sore throats, digestive discomfort, urinary tract infections and other minor conditions should go to a walk-in clinic.

Memorial operates 15 walk-in clinics and it will give anyone with one of the minor conditions a list of its clinics as well as other urgent care facilities and clinics.

“Memorial is the only Level II Trauma Center serving Harrison, Hancock, and Jackson counties,” Marchand said. “To provide the best care possible, we must make sure we have the staff and space available to treat emergency patients.”

He said next year’s budget will pay to expand the clinics’ hours into the evening and on weekends.

“The government and insurers are requiring hospitals to be better stewards of the health-care dollar and to gain operating efficiencies. Right patient, right level of care, right location, right cost, right thing to do,” he said.

Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.), in an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd about rising health-care costs, proposed last week that emergency rooms should be able to turn patients away.

In the interview, Black cited her experience working in health care to explain why mandating that emergency room workers see every patient who comes in is ineffective. “I’m an emergency room nurse,” she told Todd on Friday. “There are people that came into my emergency room that I, the nurse, was the first one to see them. I could have sent them to a walk-in clinic or their doctor the next day, but because of a law that Congress put into place … you took away our ability to say, ‘No, an emergency room is not the proper place.'”

Black is seemingly referring to the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which banned hospitals from transferring uninsured patients from private to public hospitals. “That crowds the emergency room,” Black said of the directive. “It drives the cost of emergencies up.” When Todd asked Black if she was advocating a repeal of the law, she replied, “I would get rid of a law that says that you are not allowed, as a health-care professional, to make that decision about whether someone can be appropriately treated the next day, or at a walk-in clinic, or at their doctor.”

Black’s position is largely unpopular, even among conservatives at the Heritage Foundation, who suggest an “outright appeal” of the 1986 law is “unlikely.” Kelly O’Meara Morales

A Georgia hospital is refusing to perform a life-saving kidney transplant on a 2-year-old boy born without kidneys because his father – the only donor match – violated parole.

The toddler’s father, Anthony Dickerson, 26, has had several run-ins with law enforcement, including his latest arrest in September on weapons and forgery charges.

But says his mistakes shouldn’t impact his son’s chances at having a normal chance at life.

Little A.J.’s transplant surgery was scheduled for October 3 at Emory University Hospital but then the hospital learned his father was arrested the previous month, prompting them to cancel the surgery.

Now they are saying they will “re-evaulate” the surgery in January 2018, but only if Dickerson can provide written proof he completed probation.

But the boy may not survive until January, his mother told local media. He not only also needs bladder surgery, he suffered a stroke two months ago.

“What do he got to do with the mistakes I made? Nothing,” Dickerson said in an interview with wfmynews2.

A.J.’s mother, Carmella Burgess, says the violation shouldn’t stop the donation process, especially if Dickerson is healthy.

“Two steps closer to giving him a kidney and we got shut down, basically,” Burgess said.

“They’re making this about dad,” she said. “It’s not about dad. It’s about our son.”

“We will re-evaluate Mr. Dickerson in January 2018 after receipt of this completed documentation,” a hospital representative wrote in a letter to A.J.’s parents.

Emory spokeswoman, Janet Christenbury, stated the hospital is committed to the highest quality of care for its patients, but would not elaborate as to who made the decision not to proceed with the surgery.

“Because of privacy regulations and respect for patient confidentiality, we cannot share specific information about our patients,” she said.

Although Dickenson has a troubled past, Burgess says he promised that his son would be one thing he did right in his life, according to the Atlanta Journal.

After finding out he was a 100 percent match to donate his kidney to A.J., Dickenson jumped at the opportunity to help him.

The family created a petition to urge the hospital to allow A.J.’s surgery sooner, which now has over 23,000 signatures as well as a GoFundMe page, which has reached $323 of its $1,000 goal.