MML represents Joyce Fisher, a dedicated, award-winning, and compassionate Registered Nurse (“RN”) in the Mother Baby Unit in a wrongful termination lawsuit. As alleged in the lawsuit, shortly after Mrs. Fisher arrived to work on July 5, 2025, she discovered that – overnight and prior to her arrival – two babies had been swapped, placed in the incorrect rooms, and breastfed by the incorrect mothers. It was impossible for Mrs. Fisher to prevent the mistaken breastfeeding because the patient mother for Room 444 had already breastfed the wrong infant before Mrs. Fisher’s shift even started at 7 a.m. And shortly after the start of Mrs. Fisher’s shift, the patient mother for Room 447 was already breastfeeding the wrong infant when Mrs. Fisher first walked into her room and could even introduce herself as her new nurse.
As this matter involved a serious safety issued for the families and significant legal ramification for the hospital, upon discovery Mrs. Fisher immediately reported the matter to the appropriate hospital personnel for investigation. Rather than applaud Mrs. Fisher for quick action consistent with Virtua’s own polices, the hospital did the unthinkable – they swiftly retaliated against Mrs. Fisher by suspending her and immediately terminating her employment, all in a transparent effort to shift blame, to cover up the hospital’s own policy/training failures, and to insulate themselves from potential litigation from the families. Even worse, after Mrs. Fisher refused to capitulate to hospital pressure to drop the union grievance and resign in exchange for a release of this very lawsuit, the hospital inexplicably reported Mrs. Fisher – without getting her full side of the story – to the nursing board for alleged gross negligence, jeopardizing her career and nursing license. That report not only fails to tell the entire series of events, but it also contains several false/misleading facts to bolster an otherwise pretextual, unlawful, and retaliatory termination. For example, to justify their retaliatory termination, the hospital alleged that Mrs. Fisher, who arrived at work after the babies had been swapped and breastfed by the incorrect parents, was grossly negligent by not checking identification bracelets immediately upon her arrival to work. Even if that could have made a difference, tellingly, after the events of July 5, 2025, the hospital circulated a policy that instructs nurses to verify identification for newborns “before any treatment, medication, therapy, procedure, specimen collection or transport,” none of which occurred between the start of Mrs. Fisher’s shift and her discovery of the baby swap. There are approximately 135 nurses on staff at Virtua Health’s hospital, and yet none of them were trained to check newborn identification bracelets at change of shift. Yet, Mrs. Fisher was expected to do so and allegedly fired for this reason.
The hospital was lucky to have Mrs. Fisher as the day shift nurse that day. Mrs. Fisher – an experienced, award-winning nurse who also served as the Chair for Professional Governance of the Mother Baby units and was an active participant in Virtua’s Transformational Leadership Committee – gracefully and competently handled a crisis. This is no doubt why the families, who were significantly impacted by another nurse’s error and the hospital’s lax procedures, hugged Mrs. Fisher after the events, apologized to her for having to manage the situation, and continued to request that she be their nurse for the remainder of their hospital stay.
