They knew killer was on wards

ONE OF Victorino Chua’s patients believes she ‘wouldn’t be here now’ if she hadn’t questioned the nurse about unidentified pills he tried to force her to take.

The night-shift nurse sat on Gillian Millar’s bed and told the patient the pills he was holding were ‘blood thinning’ medication.

But the 53-year-old housing association worker from Stockport didn’t swallow his story or the pills, and Chua never asked again.

Police believe Chua was trying to knock her out or even kill Gillian, who has slammed Stepping Hill Hospital’s ‘lax’ security.

Gillian said: “Maybe he got rattled and thought ‘crikey, she’s a bit more with it than the rest’.

“It was just fate. I just asked him ‘can you tell me what they are for?’”

“Worrying is the wrong word but what if I had taken those tablets? The worse case scenario is that I wouldn’t be here now. I must admit that’s been horrible, psychologically.”

Chua was cleared of the attempted poisoning of Mrs Millar and the hospital introduced reminders, refresher training, auditing and electronic prescribing was also brought in to replace paper prescriptions.

Mrs Millar slammed hospital bosses, saying they should have done far more to protect Chua’s later victims as they knew a killer was stalking the wards.

She said: “I’m very angry at the hospital, I must admit.

“There were a lot of things going on in that ward, about the way they were fetching tablets willy-nilly and if they couldn’t get them from one place they would just get them out of another cupboard.

“You know you have an alleged murderer on your ward, somebody doing something. There’s something happening.

“I’m furious about it. With the first incidents with the saline, there’s an excuse for what happened. But I can see they were in a position to be able to put things in place to stop it.

“I don’t think they went far enough.”

Judith Morris, director of nursing and midwifery at the hospital, said: “We have put very significant additional security measures in place, such as CCTV in all treatment rooms to prevent incidents of the type in July 2011 where medicines had been contaminated.

“The incidents in January 2012 were of a different nature and involved tampering with prescriptions.”