Published 30th Mar, 2024

At least 10 Nigerian nurses practising in the United Kingdom were suspended between January and March 2024.

They were individually suspended for various allegations, according to the UK’s Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC).

The council is the independent regulator of more than 808,000 nurses, midwives and nursing associates in the UK. On its website, the NMC lists several medical practitioners of various nationalities it has suspended in the last three months.

FIJ has extracted the names of individuals of Nigerian descent from the list. Documents obtained by FIJ show that some of them had been conditionally suspended for six months before fitness-to-practise committees confirmed their suspension in 2024.

S/N	NAME	NMC PIN
1	Adedoyin Fagbemi	17F1281E
2	Grace Okanlawon	06H2890E
3	Mary Folake Olanrewaju	91H0145O
4	Olayinka O Sule Oluwaleye	06I0240E
5	Jonathan Oloyede Adeoye	04C0698O
6	Chukwubuikem Obi	22C1602O
7	Olufemi Majaro	00G1406O
8	Obinna Julius Onwukwe	22B1776O
9	Akeem Seun Badmos	19D0862E
10	Akinkunmi Akintunde	04D0773O

Table showing the list of nurses suspended between January and March Source: NMC

Fagbemi was first issued an interim condition of practice order for six months on October 18, 2023. After a review, the interim order was confirmed on March 22, which could be reviewed “within the next six months and every six months thereafter”.

Through an interim order review hearing, Okanlawon’s initial interim conditions of practice was replaced with a suspension order, according to a document dated March 23.

On March 7, Olanrewaju was handed an 18-month interim suspension order by a committee chaired by one Konrad Chrzanowsk.

Similarly, an interim suspension order was directed against Adeoye on February 16 and Obi on February 14. The two committees that heard their cases ordered that their suspension last for 18 months.

On January 29 and February 6, Badmos and Onwukwe were suspended for 18 months. On the other hand, Akintunde was initially imposed 15-month interim conditions of practice order, but this was replaced with a suspension order on January 5.

The specific allegations made against these first eight registered nurses were not included in the documents seen by FIJ on Saturday.

MISCONDUCT AND DISHONESTY

Oluwaleye, who started his career in 2006, was found to have misconducted himself in the course of treating an elderly patient suffering from Parkinson’s disease at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on May 19, 2019. He was accused of creating a space in his patient’s bay to sleep on duty and locked the door to prevent anyone from disturbing him.

While the nurse was sleeping well, he left the patient in an undignified state. His grandson met him with “no blankets, his pyjama top was unbuttoned and pulled to one side, his legs were exposed, and his head was almost leaning to the right bedrail”.

“His bed was tilted at a 45 degree angle, with his legs higher than his head. He was sleeping, with a pool of phlegm covering the right side of his face,” NMC stated.

During panel sittings and investigation meetings, the nurse made incoherent and inconsistent testimonies. Eventually, he acknowledged his mistakes. The panel established a case of dishonesty against him and directed that his fitness to practise had been impaired. In the interim, it sanctioned him with an 18-month-long suspension order, having placed the patient “at serious risk of harm”. He had 28 days to appeal the decision.

STEALING AND DISHONESTY

A scrub nurse, Majaro was allegedly caught by his colleague on November 4, 2022, hiding two unused bottles of Sevoflurane, a prescription-only medicine belonging to the care house, in his personal bag at Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust, where he had been working for three years. His colleague told him that the action was bad, and he pleaded instantly.

When confronted by a clinical site manager, he changed the story, saying he found the drugs on the floor and was about returning them to the theatre. At another time, he claimed he “took the medication to provide it to another hospital”.

Two charges of dishonesty and retention of items not belonging to Majaro were proved, according to the panel. He risks being deregistered as a professional in the country.

“As ludicrous …it may sound, the real reason for my misbehaviour was that there was this other hospital where I used to work that had my shifts on a number of occasions due to the fact that their sevoflurane was out of stock, in my myopic thought that if I take those from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and give them, they may schedule more cases and I would have shifts,” the panel quoted the registered nurse as saying during cross-examination.

Like Oluwaleye, a suspension order was imposed on Majaro “for a period of 18 months to cover any potential period” of 28 days within which he could appeal the decision.

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