Is a murder charge an occupational hazard of intensive care nursing?

When nurses are accused of harming their patients there is an understandable wave of concern. When nurses kill their patients there is disbelief and horror. After all, killing patients is so far from the traditional image of the nurse as to cause distress and disorientation. When the nurse in question is a woman and when the charge amounts to serial killing, our most cherished assumptions about gender roles and professional responsibility are called into question. Yet in this decade nurses have been accused of killing patients, attempting to kill patients and causing grievous bodily harm to others. In the UK, of the nurses accused of attempting to murder their patients two came from the same specialism. Two of the three accusations centred on Intensive Care Units (ICU); the case of Amanda Jenkinson (Kenny 1996) and the case of Kath Atkinson, an ICU sister in Newcastle (Porter 1998a). In the most notorious case of nurse homicide in the UK this decade, that of paediatric nurse Beverly Allitt, the profession and society at large were shaken by accusations so serious as to defy belief.