Nurses - Criminal Conduct

Nurses are frontline healthcare providers who have significant contact with sick, elderly and often emotionally and physically compromised patients. Moreover, this contact often extends into a patient’s home and quite frequently involves their family and other personal relationships of interest to the patient. Access to financial and other personal information may be available to a nurse. For these reasons, an applicant or licensee’s criminal history and behavior is considered highly relevant to the Texas Board of Nursing in determining an individual’s present character and fitness.

Chapter 53 of the Texas Occupations Code and Nursing Board Rule §213.28 are the guiding statutory authority which governs the Board’s actions, investigations and determinations regarding applicants and licensees with criminal convictions. These matters are often loaded with highly complicated legal issues that may not be fact specific. Therefore, because the consequences are severe it is best for a nursing license applicant or nursing licensee to obtain the aid of an attorney / lawyer to help guide and represent them through the process of explaining a criminal conviction. Often times a simple legal showing of rehabilitation can bypass what would otherwise be a long and drawn out legal battle. Furthermore, rehabilitation is best shown by an attorney-advocate and not by the applicant or licensee himself since it is their character that is in question by Board Staff per the Nursing Board's policies, rules and political stance towards certain criminal offenses.

Finally, Staff of the Board takes the position that uncharged criminal offenses constitute unprofessional conduct and thus frequently request individuals to undero the rigors of a forensic psychological evaluation and polygraph test.  If a nurse encounters this request from Board Staff they should contact an attorney immediately as any unfavorable evidence / conduct discovered through this process is used to restict the license of the Nurse.  The request for a polygraph is not grounded in rule or law and should be challeneged successfully by a competent attorney.