Telenurses sanctioned after callers cut off

Senia Kelemete was suspended for two years for hanging up on callers. Photo / Thinkstock

Four nurses have been caught cutting off callers inappropriately at Healthline, the Ministry of Health-funded national telephone service for health advice.

Two have been suspended by the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal, including one, Shabnam Sharia Ali, whose three-month stand-down from practising was made public yesterday.

But last night a spokeswoman for Medibank Health Solutions, the company that runs Healthline, said two more nurses had been found out. Their cases were still before the Nursing Council.

Ms Ali quit her job as a telenurse when confronted in May 2013 over her misconduct, which had occurred earlier that year. She now has another nursing job elsewhere.

The tribunal 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.

Ms Ali admitted the charges laid by a Nursing Council professional conduct committee that she had cut off callers and/or failed to follow up the 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 around half of the 33 incidents, she made a false recording of the encounter.

"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 and 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.

In 2013, Senia Kelemete was suspended for two years for hanging up on callers. She was sacked in 2012, having been found to have ended 49 calls unnecessarily.

One terminated call was from a woman concerned about a friend with septicaemia who had missed two days of penicillin injections. The nurse terminated the call before assessing whether the woman's friend was in any immediate danger.