‘Nurses Who Watched Child Porn Allowed To Keep Jobs’

MALE nurses were allowed to carry on working despite evidence they had accessed child pornography, the deputy head of the official nursing watchdog claimed last night.

Moi Ali, vice-president of the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), said the shocking lapse was just one example of how her own organisation is leaving patients at risk of harm.

Ali claims the NMC – which officially regulates the nursing profession and has powers to strike off bad medics – is riven by a culture of bullying and incompetence.

The Scot claims that when she decided to blow the whistle on the failures of the NMC she was systematically bullied. She has now launched an employment tribunal against her own organisation.

Ali, from Addiewell, West Lothian, decided to speak to Scotland on Sunday after a Government report last week concluded there were “serious weaknesses” in the NMC, which had sometimes failed to act over substandard staff.

However, the NMC last night insisted it would “robustly” defend itself against its own vice-president, insisting her claims are incorrect and that it has vastly improved its service.

The NMC is a crucial player in ensuring that only qualified and responsible nurses and midwives are able to work in hospitals. It has the power to strike off any registered nurses whom it believes should not be on wards, thereby keeping patients safe from any rogue practitioners.

The NMC was criticised in a report last week by the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence (CHRE).

UK health minister Ben Bradshaw then called on a number of NMC staff to resign, including Ali herself.

Ali said her own concerns about the NMC began five years ago, shortly after she was appointed to the body’s council to supervise its management.

She said: “The first rumblings began surfacing about decisions we’d taken but which weren’t being implemented. We had to take on trust that things were being done, but then we became aware that things were not being done.”

In 2003, Ali said she raised concerns about why the NMC had allowed nurses who had been found to have accessed child pornography to remain on wards.

Her concerns came after one high-profile case where a male nurse was found to have been looking at images while working in a children’s ward. She said: “I was concerned about it, that maybe our panellists (the NMC members who decide on such cases] weren’t equipped to take decisions.

“We needed to give them training. I chased it up and I was told that this would be followed up, but it wasn’t. I was fobbed off.”

Ali claimed that rather than act, some colleagues simply sought to “bully” internal critics. “There is real bullying going on. They just don’t want to be held to account,” she said.

The CHRE report appears to support Ali’s position, stating they were “concerned” that the vice-president’s warnings were not acted upon.

The report also found that patients who complained to the NMC about poor practice were often treated “inappropriately”. They found it took 29 months on average to resolve a case.

The CHRE said “sectional interests within the professions rather than public safety and good regulation seem to have influenced the NMC’s decision-making”.

The report added: “We have also heard accounts of emotional and aggressive behaviour in meetings. This behaviour is undoubtedly experienced as threatening and bullying by many council members and staff involved.”

She claims the NMC has now spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on legal fees, having instructed lawyers to act against Ali and others inside the organisation who have attempted to challenge decisions.

“The public is being protected nowhere near as well as it should be. The fact we have diverted so much money paying the legal fees for complaints about each other rather than on public protection is the real issue.”

She added: “What faith can the public have in the NMC if the people who caused the problem are still there and the people who blew the whistle are being driven out?”

Referring to Bradshaw’s call for her to resign, Ali said: “I think the minister has handled this in the most dreadful way and the worst thing of all is that he has pointed the finger of blame at the whistleblower, and whistleblowing is a hugely important part of public life.

“This has been a huge personal cost for me. You can’t imagine the stress I have been through, and for the minister to then turn round and say what he has said is just unbelievable.”

Livingston MP Jim Devine said: “The CHRE report was damning of the NMC but the upshot is that Moi Ali has been told to resign. That is unacceptable. She is the whistleblower who makes allegations that are then substantiated. She should not resign.”

A spokesman for the NMC said panellists were trained on child protection issues in October 2007. “This training was carefully developed to address not just the wider issues of child protection but also to focus upon the particular issues that a panel would need to consider when hearing such a case.”

On the accusations of bullying, the spokesman said the NMC would be “robustly defending” itself at the forthcoming employment tribunal. The spokesman also said the NMC had made steps to improve its performance generally.

He added: “We continue to maintain the nursing register, set standards for education, training and conduct and, by so doing, protect the public.”