Identity crisis

A nurse with two names?

By David Baker
Posted June 20, 2007

When asked to provide the name of the nurses who were on duty on the section of Samaritan Hospital’s fourth floor where Lisa was a patient on the evening she was injured, one of the name disclosed by the hospital’s lawyers was Mary Ann Lee Salvana. And that apparent last name – Salvana – is the one that was used to identify her in the second lawsuit in this case, filed in November of 2005.

Now it appears that Salvana is not her legal last name. A check of the New York state Education Department listing of registered nurses shows no RN with the last name Salvana.

But it does show a Mary Ann Salvana LEE.

According to the department, this Mary Ann Lee lives in Latham and was granted a professional nursing license on February 21, 2003, just under nine months before Lisa was found in her hospital bed near death, and with a blood sugar level near zero.

Confusing the matter further is the discovery of a Mary Ann Salvana on a Web site for Filipinos who are looking for romance in the United States. The listing is undated and could have been added to the site at any time since the site started in 1999.

It is known that one of the nurses working that night was Asian. The photograph accompanying this listing is of an Asian woman who appears to be about the age of the person identified by the hospital as one of Lisa’s nurses that evening.

This may or not be the Mary Ann who was working at Samaritan Hospital that night. But either way, because of inaccurate information provided to my former attorney by lawyers for the hospital, it appears that the lawsuit will now have to be amended to correctly identify one of the defendants in the case.