Authorities in numerous states have reported people falsely claiming to be licensed nurses. Photo / 123rf
On April 5, Pennsylvania State Police troopers made what they thought was a routine traffic stop of a driver who turned without signalling.
Instead, they say they uncovered a multi-state web of deceit.
When the troopers approached the Mercedes SUV south of Pittsburgh in the United States, the driver provided an expired vehicle registration that did not match her ID, according to an incident report.
After getting a search warrant, troopers said they found multiple forms of identification, including access badges for healthcare facilities, as well as patient logs and prescription medication not in the driver’s name.
Investigators say the discovery led them to conclude that the driver, Shannon Nicole Womack, had used about 20 aliases and seven Social Security numbers to get hired as a nurse in Pennsylvania, and may have committed similar crimes in other states.
Womack, who has been detained in the Washington County Correctional Facility, was charged with identity theft, forgery, endangering the welfare of care and other charges.
A public defender representing her did not respond to a request for comment. She has not yet entered a plea.
The case is not unique: in recent years, authorities in numerous US states have reported people falsely claiming to be licensed nurses or working in positions that require a nursing licence without valid credentials.
Some regulatory bodies use the term “impostor nurse” to refer to these individuals and maintain “impostor lists” to try to prevent them from working in other states.
The extent of the problem is not clear because there is no centralised database tracking reports of fake nurses.
State lists hint at the scale.
Arizona lists more than 130 people who “have either applied for a position, been employed or represented themselves to others as a Nurse or Nursing Assistant without evidence of a valid licence or certificate to practice” between 2000 and 2024.
Georgia lists more than 40 but does not specify dates, and Texas lists about 140 people between 2003 and 2024.
While fraud and identity theft are not unique to nursing, a confluence of factors – staffing shortages that followed the coronavirus pandemic, different regulations among states, underfunding of some state nursing boards and a lack of oversight in some healthcare facilities – have exacerbated the problem in recent years, said Jennifer Mensik Kennedy, president of the American Nurses Association.
“You hear about those cases on social media and your heart sinks,” she said.
Impostors “can cause real damage, harm, and death to patients and individuals, and it shakes the trust of people”.
“Impostors” come in different forms, with a common one being people who have obtained contracts by using someone else’s credentials.
That is the substance of the allegations against Autumn Bardisa, who was arrested in Florida this month after investigators said she used the name and licence number of a former classmate.
Adam Barkoskie of the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, the lead investigator on the case, said Bardisa was hired as an advanced nurse tech at AdventHealth Palm Coast Parkway in July 2023.
In her application, she provided a registered nurse licence number that was linked to someone with her first name, Autumn, but a different last name.
Bardisa said it was because she had got married and changed her last name, Barkoskie said. She was asked to provide a marriage licence but never did, he added.
Between June 2024 and January 2025, Bardisa is accused of providing medical services to 4486 AdventHealth patients, despite never holding a valid nursing licence, according to charging documents.
After she was offered a promotion, a colleague checked Bardisa’s credentials and discovered that she held an expired certified nursing assistant licence, Barkoskie said.
An internal investigation found that Bardisa had never provided a marriage licence, and she was fired on January 22, he said.
Barkoskie said his team found that Bardisa had attended college with the other nurse, who was also employed by AdventHealth but at a different hospital.
AdventHealth said that it could not comment on personnel issues or legal matters but that it was co-operating with the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office.
“Patient safety is our highest priority,” it said in an emailed statement.
“The licence verification process across our system has become more automated and hardwired with the Department of Health in a way that minimises human intervention.”
Bardisa’s lawyer, Josh Davis, did not respond to a request for comment.
Having some healthcare experience can allow impostors to avoid detection for longer, Mensik Kennedy said. Others might just bounce among facilities to avoid scrutiny.
State Trooper Anthony Sayles, who led the investigation in Pennsylvania, said Womack was not licensed as a medical professional in the state and is not believed to have been licensed in any other state.
Sayles found that Womack worked shifts in nine healthcare facilities in Pennsylvania starting in 2023 and that all of them subsequently placed her on their do-not-retain lists for misconduct.
“She just didn’t know basic knowledge,” Sayles said in an interview. “Every time that somebody was onto her, she would just pick up and go do her thing somewhere else.”
During the investigation, Sayles discovered that Womack was on Georgia’s impostor list and was wanted in New Jersey, Georgia, and Tennessee, with warrants pending in other states.
She is suspected of impersonating four nurses and using their identities to secure short-term jobs, authorities said.
Mensik Kennedy said these, and other recent cases, point to the need for healthcare facilities to do more stringent vetting.
But she also said structural factors may make enforcement difficult.
For one, state nursing boards, which are typically in charge of handing out licences and investigating complaints, tend to be understaffed and underfunded, leading to delays and bottlenecks.
By the time a state nursing board completes its investigation of a suspected fraudulent nurse, that person may have had time to flee to another state and obtain work there.
This situation was further complicated by the pandemic, Mensik Kennedy said, because some states relaxed licensing rules in an effort to get nurses licensed “as quick as possible”.
“There’s a lot of push, of course. We are in a nursing shortage. But we also need to make sure we do the process correctly and we have the staff to do that process correctly,” she said.
In 2019, federal agents were tipped off that a Florida school was offering fraudulent nursing diplomas and transcripts.
For up to US$17,000 ($29,000), one could obtain the proof of education required to sit for the NCLEX, the nursing licensure exam, without having to take classes or do clinical work.
That sparked a years-long investigation, dubbed Operation Nightingale after English nurse Florence Nightingale.
Federal authorities said more than 7600 fake diplomas were distributed by three Florida nursing schools, which are now closed, between 2016 and 2021.
These schools had operated legitimately but were shut down because their students’ passing rate for the NCLEX was too low, said Fernando Porras, an assistant special agent in charge with the Miami regional office of the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG).
“Coming off of Covid, there was a significant opportunity for healthcare professionals to make more money,” Porras said.
“Those that were unlicensed – they were maybe an aide at the hospital or a certified nursing assistant – realised that if they get better credentials and licensing, they could get higher pay and more opportunities.”
In total, 31 recruiters and school officials have been convicted in connection with Operation Nightingale, Porras said.
States are still investigating some of those licences. Of the more than 7600 people who received fraudulent diplomas, about 2100 passed the NCLEX, he said, and some had to sit the test multiple times.
Porras said HHS-OIG did not identify any complaints relating to serious injuries or deaths of patients treated by nurses who obtained fraudulent diplomas and transcripts.
He argued this is a sign that the safeguards built into the system actually worked and says some nurses who obtained fraudulent diplomas may not have obtained or held on to jobs because they were not qualified.
Since Operation Nightingale, some healthcare facilities and state nursing boards have set new guardrails to prevent such large-scale diploma fraud, Porras said.
Still, he said, nursing bodies and healthcare institutions must remain vigilant to protect the public.
“One individual posing as a nurse with fake credentials is one nurse too many.”
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