Premium
In Search of the ‘Angels of Death’: Conceptualising the Contemporary Nurse Healthcare Serial Killer
Author(s) -
Yardley Elizabeth,
Wilson David
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of investigative psychology and offender profiling
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.479
H-Index - 22
eISSN - 1544-4767
pISSN - 1544-4759
DOI - 10.1002/jip.1434
Subject(s) - checklist , commit , health care , psychological intervention , psychology , test (biology) , nursing , criminology , medicine , psychiatry , computer science , law , political science , biology , paleontology , database , cognitive psychology
Abstract Focusing specifically upon nurses who commit serial murder within a hospital setting, this paper aims to establish insights into this particular subcategory of healthcare serial killer. In addition, the paper aims to test the usefulness of an existing checklist of behaviours among this group of serial murderers. Drawing upon existing lists of healthcare serial killers produced by other scholars as well as legal records and an online news archive, we identified and researched healthcare serial killer nurses, collating socio demographic and criminological data and applying the aforementioned checklist to each case. Our findings suggest that to date, the label ‘healthcare serial killer’ has been applied in too loose a manner, making the understanding of this phenomenon problematic. In further refining the definition and identifying the socio‐demographic and criminological characteristics of the victims, perpetrators and crimes, we have developed more specific and therefore useful insights for practitioners and identified a potentially useful checklist which, with revisions, could contribute towards preventative strategies and interventions. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.