A senior nurse has been struck off after leaving a distressed, hallucinating patient with dementia in an unlit equipment cupboard overnight.
Heather Davies was the nurse in charge of a night shift on a dementia ward in Hinchingbrooke hospital, Cambridgeshire, when a patient with dementia became delirious and started shouting, disturbing others in her bay, a disciplinary hearing by the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) heard this month.
A more junior nurse, Lisa Ndlovu, moved the patient into a corridor and was told by Davies the size of her bed meant “they would need to find somewhere with double doors like the ones on the equipment room”, the NMC’s report on the incident said. Davies told the disciplinary panel she meant this as an example, but Ndlovu wheeled the patient’s bed into a dark storeroom at about midnight.
A healthcare assistant who saw this later alerted Davies and they found the patient, who was frightened and hallucinating, in the dark storeroom with a window open. She was shivering and sweating, and had no call bell or “cot bumpers” on the bed to prevent her from falling. Davies conducted a brief check-up but left the patient in the room until about 6am.
Davies, who had no previous disciplinary record, told an internal inquiry the patient had been left in “an unsuitable, unacceptable, dangerous and frightening environment” and acknowledged this was a mistake. But she added the ward was under additional pressure that night because of a virus.
The NMC panel found that although Davies had not placed the patient in the storeroom herself, as the nurse in charge she had not challenged the nurse who did so and “took no action to deal with the situation or remove [the patient] from an unsafe environment”. This was an “extremely serious incident involving a serious error of judgment by Mrs Davies”, the panel found, deciding to strike her off. Ndlovu was suspended for six months for her part in the incident.
Davies declined to comment when approached by The Sun about the case. Hinchingbrooke hospital confirmed to the paper that it had dismissed her.
