A Palm Coast woman posed as a licensed nurse and treated thousands of patients at AdventHealth Hospital in Palm Coast before her ruse unraveled when she was chosen for a promotion and another employee looked into her credentials, the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office reported.
Autumn Bardisa, 29, of Palm Coast, was arrested Aug. 5 and charged with seven counts of practicing a health care profession without a license and seven counts of fraudulent use of personal identification information, the sheriff’s office stated.
Detectives determined that Bardisa had participated in medical services to 4,486 individuals from June 2024 through January 2025, despite never holding a valid nursing license, the sheriff’s office stated.
Bardisa was being held at the Sheriff Perry Hall Inmate Detention Facility on a $70,000 bond.
Autumn Bardisa
The sheriff’s office began the investigation in January after AdventHealth hospital administrators said they terminated Bardisa “for impersonating a registered nurse by utilizing another individual’s license number and submitting false documentation to be employed as an advanced nurse technician” at AdventHealth Hospital on Palm Coast Parkway in Palm Coast, according to the sheriff’s office.
The hospital hired Bardisa on July 3, 2023, as an advanced nurse tech to work under the supervision of a registered nurse, the release stated.
When she applied for a job, Bardisa indicated that she passed the required classes to be a registered nurse but had not yet passed the licensing exam. Bardisa subsequently told the hospital that she had passed the exam and gave them a license number, which matched a woman with her first name but a different last name, the sheriff’s office stated.
Bardisa said she had recently gotten married and changed her last name. She was asked to provide her marriage license but she never did, the sheriff’s office stated.
In January 2025, Bardisa was offered a promotion. That’s when a fellow employee checked Bardisa’s license. The employee discovered that Bardisa had a certified nursing assistant license, which had expired, the sheriff’s office stated. The employee reported her discovery to administrators.
AdventHealth investigated and found that Bardisa had not provided her marriage license as she had been asked to do.
Administrators fired Bardisa on Jan. 22, 2025, and the hospital contacted the sheriff’s office.
Flagler County Sheriff’s Office detectives and investigators with the Florida Department of Health and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services “determined that Bardisa shared a first name with the other nurse, who was employed by AdventHealth, but at a different hospital, and had attended school with her,” the release stated. But the two women did not know each other.
“This is one of the most disturbing cases of medical fraud we’ve ever investigated,” stated Sheriff Rick Staly. “This woman potentially put thousands of lives at risk by pretending to be someone she was not and violating the trust of patients, their families, AdventHealth and an entire medical community. Thanks to great investigative work between our detectives and State Attorney R.J. Larizza’s Office and AdventHealth, along with our state and federal partners, she’ll now be held accountable for her reckless and dangerous actions.”
Staly said his office is not aware of “any injury or death that occurred while she was working for AdventHealth that was related to any care that she provided.”
The sheriff’s office asked anyone who believed they might be a victim of Bardisa to contact the FCSO by email at fakenursecase@flaglersheriff.com for information.
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Palm Coast woman arrested after posing as AdventHealth nurse