A FORMER nurse who allowed a mentally ill patient to perform oral sex on him in a bathroom while working at Gosford Hospital has been found guilty of unsatisfactory professional conduct and professional misconduct.
Mauricio Alejandro Verdugo, 41, was supposed to look after a female patient who had been involuntarily admitted to the High Dependency Unit of the Gosford Mental Health Inpatient Unit between November 28 and December 4, 2018.
Instead, CCTV footage showed Verdugo and the patient going into a bathroom with the door shut for four minutes on the morning of December 4, 2018, where the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal ruled it was satisfied "to a high degree" that a sexual act took place.
When Verdugo was first questioned about the allegations during a misconduct investigation in 2019, he told the interviewer "that definitely didn't happen" - arguing he knew at the time the patient had oral thrush.
He later conceded the doctor doing rounds that day hadn't diagnosed the patient with thrush until after they had been alone in the bathroom together, and when the timing of the diagnosis didn't support his case, he changed his story, claiming he was told about it during the shift handover.
However, in a statement before the tribunal, he admitted there was no mention of the condition in his notes or those given to him on handover.
"The Tribunal does not accept the Practitioner's evidence that he was told that Patient A was suffering from oral thrush on the shift changeover on 4 December, 2018," the decision said.
"That evidence smacks of recent invention."
During the misconduct investigation, Verdugo claimed he was in the bathroom with the patient to give her towels, a gown and adjust the water temperature.
He told the investigator she was sitting on the floor leaning on the toilet, saying it was "too cold, too cold to have a shower, too cold, too cold".
"I remember telling her many times, 'Look, you've urinated yourself. You've got cuts on your legs that are getting infected. Your clothes are wet from urine. You need to get it changed'," he said.
"Not just myself but many other nurses were trying to encourage her to have a shower obviously throughout the day. She threw herself on the floor. She said that the water was too cold.
"I remember turning the hot on and turning to talk to her like that to say, 'Look, it's fine. Just get in. You'll be done in 15 minutes, blah blah blah'."
Verdugo claimed the patient was screaming on the floor before she crawled out of the shower, but CCTV footage showed no evidence of the patient crawling, looking upset or agitated.
His own notes from that morning gave no indication of any of the difficulties he said he experienced with the patient.
A complaint wasn't made until about four months after the incident, when the patient was re-admitted in April 2019 and told a member of staff what had happened.
Days later, Verdugo was put on special paid leave pending a formal investigation. At the time, police weren't able to get a statement from the patient and their investigations are understood to have been suspended.
The patient reported feeling or being "groomed" and that leading up to the act she felt she had displeased him, and somehow needed to please him.
During the same admission, she made similar complaints to other members of staff concerning Verdugo's conduct when she was last in hospital.
The patient made a number of claims which the tribunal did not find proven, including that Verdugo had told her that he and his wife were considering adopting Asian children and could maybe adopt her, that she could "live in the cage in the garden" in his backyard, that he had an open relationship with his wife and that she should use the word "pineapple" to get his attention if she felt unsafe in the ward.
Verdugo's registration as an enrolled nurse lapsed in July 2021 and there has been no application to renew it.
The tribunal found Verdugo guilty of unsatisfactory professional conduct and professional misconduct, and in its findings said, "the practitioner, in permitting and no doubt encouraging Patient A to engage in a sexual act with him is guilty of a gross violation of the standards expected of all nurse practitioners, whatever their level of experience might be".
"Plainly the conduct in which the practitioner engaged with Patient A is unsatisfactory professional conduct of a sufficiently serious nature to justify the suspension or cancellation of the practitioner's registration, or as the Commission now asks, a finding that if the practitioner had been registered those consequences would flow."
The Health Care Complaints Commission has made an application for costs of the proceedings, which will be dealt with at the end of Stage 2 of the proceedings.
