A Florida woman has been arrested for allegedly posing as a nurse and treating 4,486 patients despite never actually having a real license.
Autumn Bardisa, 29, was arrested by Flagler County police for practicing as a nurse without a valid license, having worked at AdventHealth Palm Coast Parkway Hospital since June 2024.
You may be wondering how she got through the hiring process in the first place without a medical license.
Well, she simply found someone with the same first name and a license and claimed it was her, and that the last name was different because she’d gotten married. The girl’s a genius! Although she’s lucky they didn’t ask for a marriage certification, I suppose.
The fake nurse was doing such a great job that she was offered a promotion. This turned out to be her undoing, however, when a co-worker discovered that her nursing assistance license had expired.
Bardisa was immediately fired, and following an investigation, arrested at her home:
NEW: Florida woman arrested for allegedly posing as a nurse and treating 4,486 patients despite never actually having a real license.
29-year-old Autumn Bardisa was arrested by Flagler County police for practicing as a nurse without a valid license.
Bardisa worked at… pic.twitter.com/o3n2kVUeC6
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) August 7, 2025
It’s actually hard to know how to feel about this, given that Autumn Bardisa was clearly a fantastic nurse. So good in fact that she was able to treat 4,400 patients and was offered a promotion. In the end, she was arrested for doing a good job without the right papers. She’s basically the nursing version of Patrick J Adams’s character from Suits!
Obviously Bardisa should have gone through the correct channels and it’s completely scandalous that this was allowed to happen. Theoretically, she could have injured or killed a patient and that would have been a disaster of epic proportions for everyone involved.
At the same time, we all know there’s a nursing shortage going on not just in the UK but also over in the US where Bardisa was doing such a bang-up job without a license, and so it’s too bad that the state of Florida will now be minus one non-qualified but extremely capable nurse. In fact it’s pretty indicative of the state of nursing in general if someone who isn’t even qualified can just walk in off the street and outperform all the other nurses to the point that she gets offered a promotion.
Makes you wonder whether there are any other doctor and nurses out there currently practicing without a license? At least Autumn Bardisa took the role seriously. Unfortunately she was so good that she ultimately got found out due to being put up for promotion. If only she was a terrible nurse, she would still be working at AdventHealth Palm Coast Parkway Hospital to this day.
Let that be a lesson to anyone out there looking to get a job without the adequate mandatory qualifications: don’t try too hard. Just coast along and everything will be alright.
For the NHS worker who beat up a patient who then yelled: “you’re supposed to be looking after us”, click HERE. Classic.
