Some claimed they did it for the good of their patients, others created scenarios where they could try to heroically save a life, and some just seemed to enjoy the power to inflict sudden death.
The multiple murder charges laid against a Woodstock, Ont., nurse Tuesday may have shocked many Canadians, but the case was hardly unique.
Across North America and Europe, dozens of nurses and other health-care workers have been accused of deliberately killing patients, usually with medications meant to make their charges better.
By one academic’s estimate, health-care criminals have been convicted of killing at least 328 people, while close to another 2,000 suspicious deaths have been linked less definitively to those medical murderers.
“It’s relatively rare in terms of murder and serial murder,” David Wilson, a criminology professor at Birmingham City University in Britain, said Tuesday. “(But) it’s just that it’s so shocking, because clearly these are people to whom we entrust our families, our loved ones.”
Many have noticeable personality or psychiatric problems that are missed because health-care administrators desperate for more nurses often fail to check references, he said.