Ebola nurse hid high temperature ‘ because illness confused her’
EBOLA nurse Pauline Cafferkey ‘potentially put the public at risk’ by failing to report her high temperature on her return to the UK, a disciplinary panel has heard.
That risk was ‘significant’ and the fact that she did not reach an infectious stage was simply ‘good fortune’, a lawyer for the Nursing and Midwifery Council said yesterday.
It was claimed Miss Cafferkey’s conduct in leaving a screening area at Heathrow Airport without reporting her temperature damaged the public’s trust in the nursing profession.
The nurse, who twice almost died from ebola after she came home from Sierra Leone, could be struck off over two charges relating to her return to the UK on December 28, 2014.
The first alleges that while in a Public Health England screening area, inside Terminal 4 at Heathrow, she allowed an incorrect temperature to be recorded on her screening form. The second alleges that she left the screening area without reporting her true temperature to medics.
Miss Cafferkey admitted the charges at an NMC hearing in Edinburgh, but denies they amount to misconduct.
Experts say the brain disease ‘substantially affected’ her ability to make rational decisions. This meant that a charge that she had behaved dishonestly was dropped.
Her lawyer, Joyce Cullen, said the nurse had been exhausted and ill when she walked out of the screening area. She had spent six weeks in Sierra Leone.
It has been alleged a fellow nurse may have recorded Miss Cafferkey’s temperature wrongly on a form because she wanted to ‘get out of here’.
After leaving, she told another doctor of her temperature, but was put on a plane to Glasgow after it fell. She admits failing to tell a doctor she had taken paracetamol, which can lower body temperature.
The case has raised further fears over screening for ebola.
There are claims that Public Health England allowed volunteers to take their own temperatures, missed one person who should have been screened altogether, and was chaotic.
But the NMC lawyer, Anu Thompson, said: ‘We say that Miss Cafferkey’s conduct potentially put the public at risk and her conduct undermines the trust and confidence the public has in the profession.’
Nine people who sat near to the UK’s first ebola victim on her return flight to Glasgow on December 28, 2014, and another – believed to be her taxi driver – faced a three-week wait to see if they might have ebola after she was diagnosed the next day.
The danger was in fact low. Miss Cafferkey had not yet had diarrhoea or vomiting, which accompany a raised risk of infecting others. But Mrs Thompson said: ‘She simply could not have known how much of a risk she presented.’
A statement of facts agreed by the nurse reveals she knew her temperature was too high. A doctor gave her two readings of 38.2 and 38.3 degrees, but said he heard a fellow nurse planning to write it on the form as 37.2, stating that they would ‘get out of here and sort it out’.
Miss Cafferkey cannot recall who wrote her temperature on the screening form.
But she accepts that she knew her temperature had been measured at above 37.5 degrees – the point at which it should be reported to a consultant.
Miss Cafferkey’s lawyer said the nurse, from Cambuslang in Lanarkshire had an unblemished record. The panel is due to decide whether she is guilty of misconduct today.