Somerset Medical Center Fires Charles Cullen

Somerset Medical Center Fires Charles Cullen was the abrupt end of Charles Cullen’s employment at the hospital, but not a resolution of the questions surrounding him. Somerset told him that discrepancies in the dates of his previous employment were the reason for his termination. Cullen, however, connected the decision to the growing attention after Reverend Gall’s death and to an earlier investigation at Saint Luke’s Hospital—an explanation he had not fully shared with Amy Loughren, his friend and coworker.

Scrutiny Before the Dismissal

By the time Somerset acted, its insulin controls had already become a point of conflict on the unit. After a new sign-out procedure required nurses to record electronically how much insulin remained in a vial, Amy Loughren challenged the change. She considered estimating the amount by sight unreliable and objected that management would not explain why insulin was being treated with new caution. Her refusal to sign did not establish what had happened to patients, but it showed that the hospital had changed its handling of the drug without giving her the information she wanted.

The suspicion surrounding Cullen had also taken on a wider significance. At Saint Barnabas Hospital, insulin had been found in IV bags, and investigators examining the affected patients’ charts found neither prescriptions nor nursing notations to explain the drug’s presence. Those findings belong to the earlier investigation, not to the stated reason for Cullen’s dismissal at Somerset. They nevertheless form part of the book’s larger pattern: abnormal patient events could prompt new controls and inquiries while the people working under those controls remained uncertain about what management knew.

At Somerset, the death of Reverend Gall increased the hospital’s attention to Cullen. In their conversation after his dismissal, Cullen suggested that the hospital was scrutinizing its records because of the investigation. He also raised the possibility that someone at Saint Luke’s had seen his image in a recruitment flyer and that information from his former workplace had resurfaced. These were Cullen’s explanations, not confirmed findings about Somerset’s decision. The distinction matters: the hospital gave him a specific administrative reason, while Cullen interpreted the timing through the history of investigations and lost jobs that he said had followed him.

The Termination

The night itself had been unremarkable. Cullen had cared for his patients and worked on their charts before he was called to an office near the end of his shift. The word used was “terminated.” In his experience, he observed, employers did not say “fired.” The plain, formal language made the action sound procedural, even as it ended his employment.

Cullen told Loughren that someone from Somerset’s human-resources department had sat him down shortly before the shift ended. The stated issue was “inaccuracies on his application,” specifically the dates of his previous employment at Saint Luke’s Hospital. Cullen said the dates were approximate and suggested that, after sixteen years of nursing, he could not be expected to remember every one precisely. His explanation framed the discrepancies as imprecision rather than deception; the account does not establish whether the dates were the true reason Somerset had looked again at his application.

The timing unsettled Loughren. Somerset had employed Cullen for nearly a year and had presented him publicly as a recruitment success. A flyer sent to thousands of prospective employees featured his photograph and a short personal statement praising the ease of charting through the Cerner electronic record system. Cullen had acted coy about the publicity, but Loughren had seen that he was proud of it, took care with his appearance, and enjoyed the attention. That the hospital had featured him so prominently and then scrutinized his application gave the dismissal a sharp reversal: he had been made a representative of the institution before being removed by it.

Loughren’s Reaction

Loughren heard the news on a day off, while raking leaves, when her friend Donna called. She first cried, then became angry. During the four-hour commute to her night shift at Somerset, she broke down again and had to compose herself in the parking garage before entering the hospital. The ward felt dull without Cullen there. Their working relationship had included more than ordinary collegiality: she had listened to accounts of his troubles, defended him when residents criticized his drug choices, and once claimed responsibility for a medication error he had made.

The dismissal also seemed to her to arrive at a particularly painful moment in his life. Cullen had told her stories of being bullied and of being pushed from one hospital to another because of his depression. That same week, he had learned that his girlfriend, Cathy, was pregnant. Loughren imagined him once again cast out from a job and felt that she had failed to protect him. Her distress was not a conclusion about his innocence so much as evidence of how strongly she had identified with his account of himself as a vulnerable person repeatedly treated unfairly.

When she reached him by telephone, Cullen said he did not understand why Somerset had terminated him. As he talked, he added that he might not have told her the whole story about Saint Luke’s. He said there had been an investigation there, that he had resigned under a cloud, and that it had taken six months to clear up. He suspected the episode had damaged his employment prospects; after he reapplied to Easton Hospital, it did not hire him, and he believed someone at Saint Luke’s might have warned the hospital away. The account supports the existence of the earlier investigation and a contact by attorney Paul Laughlin with an Easton intensive-care staff member, but Cullen’s interpretation of why Easton did not hire him remains his own.

From Loyalty to Doubt

For Loughren, the dismissal could not be separated from the growing investigation into Somerset’s patient incidents. The police interviews had already stirred fear on the unit. Nurses worried that suspicion might affect their jobs and reputations, while rumors connected Cullen, insulin, and a patient’s death. Other nurses avoided Loughren because everyone knew she was Cullen’s friend and remembered her objections to the insulin sign-out procedure. She, too, feared that investigators might suspect her or that her own actions had put her nursing license at risk.

The change in her understanding came when a detective showed her a printout from Cullen’s Pyxis automated medication dispensing system for the night Reverend Gall died. Loughren recognized the record and could no longer dismiss the possibility that Cullen had done something terrible during his shifts. Yet the document did not erase her memories of defending him or instantly reconcile the evidence with her image of her friend. The firing therefore sits within a gradual, painful reversal: first the hospital’s unexplained caution around insulin, then the rumors and official scrutiny, and finally a record that made her question the person she had trusted.

Loughren hesitated before agreeing to assist the investigators. She knew that cooperation could endanger her job, and she worried the detectives might be wrong or manipulating her. Her choice was not a clean passage from friendship to accusation. She continued working as a nurse while sharing information with the investigators, feeling increasingly exposed and alone, though seeing them work helped her feel somewhat braver. The dismissal did not itself prove a crime; its significance lies in how it intensified scrutiny, exposed the gap between Cullen’s account and the history he had withheld, and changed the conditions under which Loughren could remain his defender.