By JASON WHITELY / WFAA-TV
DALLAS – Few times in history has nursing become such a lucrative career.
"A good nursing supervisor, a manager, can make more than $100,000 a year in some cases,” said Devon Herrick, Senior Fellow, National Center for Policy Analysis.
Salaries spiked because of a shortage in the industry. But among the hardworking dedicated nurses are some with questionable backgrounds.
News 8 compared names and dates of births of every currently licensed nurse against the Texas Department of Public Safety criminal database.
The result revealed that thousands of Texas nurses have arrest records. In fact, one in 20 of them have records.
More than half of those work in hospitals and nursing homes. Some have charges as serious as arson, attempted murder and deadly conduct.
But what seemed even more remarkable was that the Texas Board of Nursing didn't know about many of the arrests since its own background checks won't be complete until 2012, according to the Board’s Director of Enforcement Tony Diggs.
WFAA: How can we find this data in a matter of hours and it takes the state years to find these?
"Well, I don't know the system you're using, but let me emphasize our check is a national check," Diggs said when asked how the data News 8 found in hours wasn't discovered yet by the board. "It's not a local check. It's not a state check. It's a national check."
It is also a fingerprint check. Until recently though, it was up to nurses to themselves to disclose their pasts.
"I guess what surprises me is that you were able to find it so easily because the technology is out there," Herrick said.
Among the nurses with criminal histories is one currently licensed nurse who was charged with attempted murder in Collin County for stabbing a man in the chest during a domestic dispute in the early '90s.
Dallas police arrested another currently licensed nurse for a kidnapping in 1998 after another domestic situation.
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