Nurse suspended for cutting off callers

A nurse has been suspended for repeatedly cutting off callers to Healthline. File photo / Thinkstock

A nurse has been suspended for repeatedly cutting off callers to the Health Ministry-funded telephone advice service, Healthline.

Shabnam Sharia Ali quit her job as a telenurse when she was confronted in May 2013 over her misconduct, which had occurred earlier that year. She had worked there since 2008.

The Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal has suspended Ms Ali from nursing for three months, imposed a 12-month period of supervision from when she returns to nursing, and ordered her to pay $7200 towards the costs of her prosecution and tribunal hearing.

She admitted the charges laid by a Nursing Council professional conduct committee that she had cut off callers and/or failed to follow up disconnected calls on 33 occasions, and that this amounted to professional misconduct.

In two of those incidents, Ms Ali "released the calls while having an online conversation with another staff member", the tribunal says in a decision made public today. In around half of the 33 incidents, she made a false recording of the encounter and in many she failed to document the call.

"Full recordings were kept of all calls made to the facilitiy including to Ms Ali and a proportion of these were also the subject of visual capture on screen. Accordingly the employer had access to sound recordings of all calls and screen recordings of some of these calls.

"Approximately 1 per cent randomly selected of all calls a nurse received were listened to by a senior nurse and there was provision for the review of calls."

Trained in Fiji, Ms Ali told the tribunal she regretted her actions which were "very unprofessional" and she accepted she had put callers at risk.

She referred to having been under extreme stress mainly from sickness at home. Her son aged 2 at the time was in hospital with encephalitis and seizures. Her husband was also in hospital, with peritonitis related to dialysis after the failure of his kidney transplant, an operation that had been necessitated by meningococcal disease some years earlier.

It is the second case of this type of misconduct at Healthline to go before the tribunal.

Senia Kelemete was suspended for two years in 2013 for hanging up on callers. She had been sacked in 2012, having been found to have ended 49 calls unnecessarily between May 2011 and January 2012.

Some calls were as short as three seconds, others were cut off after callers were greeted.
On one occasion, she terminated a call from a woman concerned about a 17-year-old friend with septicaemia who had missed two days of penicillin injections.
The caller said her friend had chest pain over her heart. The nurse terminated the call before assessing whether the woman's friend was in any immediate danger.