Medical Center Health Care Services

Medical Center Health Care Services was the staffing intermediary through which Charles Cullen worked in hospital units, including at Saint Barnabas Medical Center. Its records place his formal employment with the agency rather than the hospital itself, and document concerns ranging from poor documentation and medication errors to canceled ventilation orders. The distinction matters: Cullen’s work took place inside hospitals, but his employment and personnel history were not necessarily held in their files.

Structure and Function

Formerly known as Livingston Health Services, Medical Center Health Care Services was a wholly owned, for-profit subsidiary of Saint Barnabas Health Care Corporation. It supplied staffing to hospital units, including units at Saint Barnabas Medical Center. Cullen was therefore technically employed by the staffing agency, even while delivering care in a hospital setting.

That arrangement separated the place where Cullen worked from the organization that formally employed him. The distinction becomes consequential in the book’s account of his personnel history: agency records documented his employment and conduct, while Saint Barnabas Medical Center later could not locate a file for him.

Cullen’s Employment and Removal from Booking

Medical Center Health Care Services records indicate that Cullen became “do not book” between January 6 and January 10, 1992. The agency did not use the terms terminated or fired for this status. The stated reasons were poor documentation and a “decreasingly poor attitude.” The designation thus appears in the account as an employment action expressed through the agency’s own terminology, rather than as a conventional firing notice.

The agency’s documentation also traces concerns to specific earlier incidents. On June 20, 1990, Cullen canceled a physician’s continuous ventilation order for a burn patient; the following morning, June 21, he canceled another ventilation order for a different patient. These were not merely vague complaints about demeanor: the cited records describe interference with orders concerning patients’ respiratory support.

Documented Medication and Care Concerns

A March 14, 1991 incident involved a prescribed medicine that Cullen failed to give. An incoming nurse found that he had instead hung an IV bearing only a red label, with no written identification. Coworkers expressed deep concern about his attitude toward the dual medication error and said he seemed unconcerned about either the error or the patient’s welfare. The records thus paired a concrete lapse in care with colleagues’ alarm at his response to it.

Another documented occurrence involved insulin. Cullen wrote an order on a patient’s chart for four units, although the patient was not to receive insulin. The incident added a medication-related discrepancy to the earlier concerns about ventilation orders, documentation, and administration of prescribed medicine. The account does not say that these incidents alone led to a particular patient’s death; it presents them as part of the employment record behind the agency’s decision not to book him.

Records and Institutional Significance

In records described in the book, the human-resources departments at Hunterdon Hospital and Warren Hospital confirmed that Cullen had been employed by them. Medical Center Health Care Services also confirmed that it could vouch for his employment from 1990. Saint Barnabas Medical Center, by contrast, could not locate a file for him. The contrast underscores how a staffing arrangement could distribute an employee’s history across organizations rather than leave a complete account in the hospital where the work occurred.

Medical Center Health Care Services is therefore significant both as Cullen’s formal employer and as a holder of contemporaneous warnings. Its records show that concerns about his practice had been documented before the later investigations, while the different locations of employment and personnel files complicate how those concerns could be assembled into a single institutional history.