Jones C
School of Health Studies, Fazackerley Hospital, Liverpool, UK.
Intensive Crit Care Nurs. 1998 Aug;14(4):208-12. doi: 10.1016/s0964-3397(98)80551-x.
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.
当护士被指控伤害患者时，会引发一阵可以理解的担忧。而当护士杀害患者时，则会令人难以置信和感到恐惧。毕竟，杀害患者与护士的传统形象相去甚远，会引起痛苦和混乱。当涉案护士为女性且指控涉及连环杀人时，我们对性别角色和职业责任最珍视的假设就会受到质疑。然而在这十年里，护士被指控杀害患者、企图杀害患者以及对他人造成严重身体伤害。在英国，被指控企图谋杀患者的护士中有两人来自同一专业领域。三项指控中有两项集中在重症监护病房（ICU），即阿曼达·詹金森案（肯尼，1996年）和纽卡斯尔的重症监护病房护士长凯思·阿特金森案（波特，1998年a）。在英国这十年里最臭名昭著的护士杀人案中，儿科护士贝弗利·阿利特的案件引发的指控极其严重，令人难以置信，震动了整个行业和整个社会。
