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Govito v. West Jersey Health System6/21/2000
NOT FOR PUBLICATION WITHOUT THE APPROVAL OF THE APPELLATE DIVISION
Argued May 17, 2000
On appeal from Superior Court of New Jersey, Law Division, Camden County.
In Bainhauer v. Manoukian, 215 N.J. Super. 9 (App. Div. 1987), we determined that the conditional special-interest privilege described in Coleman v. Newark Morning Ledger Co., 29 N.J. 357 (1959), applied to the publication of defamatory information by a physician concerning the conduct of another physician. We concluded that the policy implications attendant to the quality of health care in a hospital setting required the application of such privilege to that factual circumstance. This appeal presents the question of whether such privilege applies to a nurse who is defamed in the course of an "intervention" prompted by false allegations that the nurse was improperly diverting and using morphine. We conclude that such privilege does apply under these facts. We further conclude that the confrontation of the nurse in the presence of a secretary did not rise to the level of excessive publication or an abuse of the privilege. Lastly, we conclude that plaintiff failed to establish a sufficient basis to warrant submitting her claim for negligent infliction of emotional distress to the jury. Accordingly, we affirm the trial judge's involuntary dismissal of plaintiff's complaint.
We address the issues raised in the following factual and procedural context. Plaintiff Suzanne Govito served as a registered nurse at defendant West Jersey Health System, Inc.'s (WJHS) intensive care unit, working the 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. shift four to five shifts per week. On October 11, 1993, an empty morphine tubex (a syringe package containing morphine) was found in the nurses' lounge in the intensive care unit (ICU) of WJHS. Donna Floyd, who was then head nurse, was instructed by her superior, Kathy Pace, the Assistant Director of Nursing, to follow up on the incident by "pulling several months of narcotics sheets." Floyd "didn't know how to follow up" but "flipped through" the sheets not knowing what she was looking for. The sheets contained the sign-outs for morphine, which each nurse was required to sign every time she took morphine from its locked storage box. Floyd discovered that plaintiff's name appeared much more frequently than the other nurses'; in fact, plaintiff accounted for thirty-seven percent of the morphine signed out of the unit.
On November 3, 1993, after plaintiff had worked her regular shift, and had been awake for twenty-four hours, Floyd asked her to proceed to the nursing office. Instead, Floyd led her to a conference room where Pace was waiting with two investigators from the New Jersey State Department of Law and Public Safety. They had the narcotics sheets spread out before them. Plaintiff informed them that she was exhausted and wanted to get some sleep prior to talking to them, but they refused. For the next hour, the investigators asked plaintiff questions about her procedure for signing out morphine, and plaintiff realized that they were accusing her of being a drug user and diverter. Before they were finished, plaintiff told them she was too tired to think straight and left the room.
Plaintiff walked through the hall and saw a group of people gathered together, including Pace, Floyd, Joan Eddy, the Director of Nursing, Kim Russo, the head nurse supervisor in critical care, Denise Yheaulon, a fellow nurse, and defendant Recovery Network's Mari Oresic.
Yheaulon was a nurse at West Jersey who was a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. The night before, someone from Recovery Network had asked her to take part in an "intervention" that was to take place on the mor
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