A palliative care nurse in Germany has been sentenced to life in prison after he was convicted of the murder of 10 patients and the attempted murder of 27 others.

Prosecutors alleged that the man, who has not been publicly named, injected his mostly elderly patients with painkillers or sedatives in an effort to ease his workload during shifts overnight.

  • join@lemmy.ml
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    7 hours ago

    The article does not mention the evidence basis, so I will keep my comment general. In the Netherlands similar accusations were made against Lucia de Berk, the evidence was based on opinions of superiors and colleagues plus the statistical unlikelihood of so many patients dying under her supervision. But crucially there was never any direct evidence that she deliberately killed patients, and in the end it turned out that she didn’t. She was particularly unliked by her colleagues because she was a sex worker in the past and that is why she was given the worst shifts (and coincidentally the shifts where more patients die). In the end her life was ruined by her colleagues and the judiciary system not understanding statistics (5 percent of all nurses have a statistically-significant high death rate). Again this case could be a real psychopath but the fact that they don’t mention the evidence basis makes me think of Lucia de Berk.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_de_Berk_case

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      the judiciary system not understanding statistics (5 percent of all nurses have a statistically-significant high death rate).

      And for those in this thread who also don’t understand statistics, that’s because the threshold for statistical significance is usually 5% by definition and has nothing to do with nursing at all.