Santa Mandera was found to have falsified a patient’s drug records
A South London mental health nurse who gave a patient the wrong medication and tried to hide her mistake has been struck from the register.
Santa Mandera was found to have given drugs incorrectly and falsified a patient’s records while working at a private psychiatric hospital in Wandsworth, which has not been named.
A Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) misconduct panel ruled Ms Mandera’s fitness to practise as a nurse was impaired after a series of hearings which ended in July. In a new report, the panel said Ms Mandera’s conduct had shown “a disregard for fundamental nursing responsibilities”.
The report said: “The concerns created risks to patient safety, undermined confidence in the accuracy of clinical information being relied upon for patient care and impacted the practise of other healthcare professionals.”
The hospital opened an investigation into Ms Mandera in August 2021, when she denied the charges. She resigned from the hospital on November 4, 2021, and was referred to the NMC in January 2022.
The panel found Ms Mandera left a high-risk patient unsupervised for around 20 minutes on March 18, 2021. It ruled she also gave more than double the correct dose of Diazepam to another patient on July 27, 2021.
On the same shift, Ms Mandera was found to have given another patient a dose of Olanzapine after a doctor had decided they should no longer have it. The panel said she then recorded giving the patient a dose of the same drug at midnight in a bid to hide her error, hoping the confusion about which day it was given, due to the time, would mask the truth.
The panel found Ms Mandera also mistakenly copied and pasted notes from one patient’s records to another’s, which was raised as a concern on August 9, 2021.
Rosie Welsh, representing the NMC, said the incidents were “not isolated matters of poor practice but represent serious failures in fundamental nursing duties, including the supervision of a vulnerable patient, safe administration of medication, accurate record keeping, and maintaining honesty and integrity within professional practice”.
Priya Khanna, representing Ms Mandera, said she had been dealing with difficult personal circumstances and had completed training to improve her practice since the incidents.
The panel ruled Ms Mandera’s actions had fallen seriously short of the standards expected of a registered nurse and amounted to misconduct.
The report said: “The panel considered that the concerns were wide-ranging and involved different areas of nursing practice, including failures to undertake appropriate observations, failures in medication administration, failures in record keeping, inaccurate documentation, and a failure to demonstrate openness and honesty when concerns arose.
“The panel found that these were not isolated errors but a pattern of conduct affecting more than one patient over a five-month period.”
The panel decided to strike Ms Mandera from the register.
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