NIGERIAN NURSE FACES TRIAL IN LONDON FOR NEGLIGENCE

THE trial of a Nigerian nurse, Tititlola Orefuwa Titilola, who went on social networking website, Facebook, while caring for a critically ill child at the Basildon and Thurrock University Hospital, begins today. Another Nigerian nurse was tried over three days last week for abusing his professional status by forging a relationship with a patient under his care.

Orefuwa, who was a staff nurse at the hospital between January and April 2010, will appear before the Nursing and Midwifery Council Fitness to Practice Panel over the next seven days to answer nine charges, including that of going on Facebook while caring for the critically ill child on January 31, 2010.

She risks being struck off the council’s register if found guilty, and faces eight other charges, including breaching her employer’s guidance by leaving a sedated child without medical supervision as the boy was transferred for an MRI scan at the Great Ormond Street Hospital around August 31, 2007

Among others, she is also charged with swearing at a colleague and threatening to go home when asked to swap wards in June 2008. She is also accused of leaving an operating theatre and failing to catch a drip specimen while an operation was being carried out on a patient in May 2007. Other incriminating charges include failing to respond to another patient’s saturations monitor alarm in June 2008.

Her charge sheet also revealed that in March 2010 while caring for another patient, she failed to adequately check the patient’s temperature and to carry out the doctor’s order that the patient be put on restricted fluids.

The Nursing and Midwifery Council has also charged the former head nurse with other offences committed in March 2010, including dispensing medication, which had not been prescribed to another patient. If found guilty, she will be struck off the Nursing and Midwifery Council register. On January 3, another Nigerian nurse was struck off of the register.

Just last week, another Nigerian nurse who was a team leader at a ward at the Cygnet Hospital, Beckton, East London, was arraigned before the panel for breaching his professional boundaries while working there in December 2009.

Source: Guardian