Auckland nurse Ashwani Lal has been deregistered after she blatantly misled the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal. Photo / 123rf
Auckland nurse Ashwani Lal has been deregistered after she blatantly misled the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal. Photo / 123rf
A nurse penned a fake reference from her employer, speaking of her “good integrity” and “kind nature”, and successfully used it to mitigate the penalties she was facing in a disciplinary matter after she was caught stealing from a patient.
But this was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to the level of Ashwani Lal’s deceit.
In reality, Lal had been refused a reference by the GP she claimed to be employed by at the time of her case before the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal (HPDT) in 2020.
The tribunal was none the wiser and the fabricated document, in which Lal had also forged the signature of the GP, was a significant factor in the Auckland woman being given a “once-only second chance” to continue nursing.
In a decision released by the HPDT earlier this year but only published on Thursday, it said Lal would have succeeded in her “subterfuge” had it not been for the publicity that followed the 2020 decision, which saw her censured and suspended from nursing for nine months.
However, after her “calculated” deception of the tribunal was uncovered, Lal was charged with professional misconduct and returned before the HPDT.
She has now been stripped of her registration.
The recent decision sets out that Lal, who registered as a nurse in 2012, claimed to be working as a receptionist at a medical centre when she was before the HPDT in 2020. In truth, she was no longer employed by the practice.
She created a fake email address for the GP who owned the centre and sent an email to the lawyers who were representing her in the proceedings.
Pretending to be the employer, she asked the lawyers “… outline for me what I need to provide in the letter for tribunal to help Ashwani in her nursing”.
The Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal heard the case earlier this year. Photo / Thinkstock
The lawyers responded, setting out topics a reference might cover. Lal sent further emails to the lawyers impersonating the employer.
In the typed reference, Lal, claiming to be the employer, wrote they were “aware that Ashwani is facing a disciplinary charge before the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal and that this letter will be provided as a reference for her at the hearing”.
It went on to say how Lal had been transparent about her convictions, that her last employer gave her a good reference and that she was remorseful.
The letter detailed a hardship Lal claimed to be suffering and how her employer “felt for her”. The detail of that alleged hardship has been suppressed by the HPDT.
“Ashwani has been working for me for about four months now. Ashwani is a responsible, reliable and hardworking employee. She is a very nice, kind natured girl and as an employer, I would say she has good integrity.”
The letter concluded with the “employer” stating Lal wished to return to nursing and that the centre would provide her with that opportunity once she obtained a practising certificate.
Lal has now admitted to the HPDT that she fabricated the reference “in its entirety”. But for a time, she persisted with her false assertions and provided the fake email chain as “proof” her former employer had written the reference.
“Not only did [Lal] proffer a false and forged reference to the tribunal at the hearing in October 2020, when first challenged about it in the course of the Professional Conduct Committee investigation she stuck doggedly and even aggressively to a story which she knew to be entirely false,” the decision said.
The former employer had no idea what Lal had done, nor did the lawyers who acted for her in the earlier HPDT proceedings.
The decision said the document was a deliberate, and successful, attempt to deceive the tribunal.
Lal told the tribunal she had forged the reference because she was “desperate” and had “panicked and did not think”.
“After I was charged with theft, my world fell apart. I had to appear before the tribunal and I faced losing everything.
“I was desperate. I had letters from a lot of other people, but not the person I worked for. She had told me she would give me one but then she didn’t. She was in a dispute with her practice partner … and I think she was afraid of what he would say if she supported me.”
But the tribunal rejected her submissions. It found the former employer had not indicated she would provide a reference but had instead refused to provide one.
It also ruled the forgery was not the result of an act of panic.
“One only has to read the document to see that it is a carefully constructed piece of writing,” the decision stated.
“This was a calculated and sustained exercise in putting false evidence before the tribunal.”
The decision said the tribunal that dealt with the case in 2020 had no reason to believe the document was anything other than what it purported to be.
It wasn’t until a doctor who worked at the centre had read a news article about the case and the mention of the reference, that the dishonesty was uncovered. He contacted the Nursing Council and an investigation commenced.
The doctor whose signature had been forged by Lal told the Professional Conduct Committee during the investigation that she did not write the reference and Lal was not even working at the medical centre on the date given on the document. She also did not know about Lal’s convictions, stating they never would have employed her had they known.
In January this year, when the HPDT was considering the issue of penalty, Lal called evidence from the business manager at a new medical practice where she was employed.
She was initially hired as a receptionist but moved into the role of a nurse once her suspension period had lapsed.
The manager said Lal had informed the practice of her past offending to explain why she would not get a clean Police vetting report.
But the decision said that during the course of her giving evidence, it became apparent the manager had been misled by Lal.
She was under the impression the claims made against Lal by her former employer were false. She had not seen any documents relating to the case and was not aware of the charges Lal faced or that she had pleaded guilty to them.
“It is fair to say that the business manager was taken aback when told of the real nature of the charge being faced by [Lal].”
On the three counts of professional misconduct, the tribunal cancelled Lal’s registration as a nurse.
“A practitioner cannot come to this Tribunal, give evidence on issues of substantive importance which they know to be false when giving it, try to conceal what they have done, and then – when caught out - hope that the starting point for evaluation of penalty will be something less than cancellation.”
Tara Shaskey joined NZME in 2022 as a News Director and Open Justice reporter based in Taranaki. She has been a reporter since 2014 and previously worked at Stuff where she covered crime and justice, arts and entertainment, and Māori issues.
