A DISABILITY support worker who was convicted of two counts of assault over her treatment of a patient, but failed to report her crimes to health authorities, has been cancelled for two years.
Lisa Margaret Robson was working for Life Without Barriers at an NDIS-funded group home in Green Point on the Central Coast as a registered nurse, looking after a woman with profound vulnerabilities.
The woman lived with dementia, schizophrenia, and an intellectual disability, used a wheelchair and had limited communication skills.
The first assault occurred on Valentine's Day, February 14, 2021, in the lead up to which the woman could be heard screaming.
Two fellow workers at the group home then saw Ms Robson screaming back at the woman and slapping her on the hand telling her to 'stop screaming'.
On the second occasion, the morning of February 17, 2021, Ms Robson was seen out the front of the building smoking a cigarette. When asked how the night went, she described the patient as "a pain in the arse".
"I can't stand her. The other day she wouldn't take her medicine and I pushed her head back and threw the tablets down her throat," she had said, according to details contained in a NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal judgement handed down against her this week.
A few days later, she was seen to force a spoonful of tablets into the victim's mouth, which caused the patient to scream and spit the medication out.
Ms Robson then screamed at the woman, saying "take it, take it", pushing the medication back into the mouth of the victim with her fingers.
Ms Robson was convicted in Gosford Local Court of two counts of assault and was placed on an 18 month conditional release order.
However, she failed to advise the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency of those convictions as required by law.
The tribunal described her conduct as "a significant departure from the standards expected of her as a nurse".
Given the acute vulnerabilities of the patient, her conduct was "abhorrent", involving a pronounced abuse of power.
Ms Robson had appealed against the severity of her sentence, but the tribunal echoed the findings of the appeal judge who said she rejected the notion that the offences were trivial.
"On the contrary, I regard each offence as serious example of common assault, having regard to the particular vulnerability of the victim and the relationship between the Appellant and the Victim at the time of the offending," the appeal judge said.
In a letter to the tribunal dated March 13, 2023, Ms Robson said she was suffering from burn-out at the time of the offence and that her relationships with her work colleagues were strained.
However, just months after the incidents in June, 2021, she told police she "cannot even hit her own children".
She also said she'd known the victim for 30 years, and denied hitting her, saying she only held her hand to comfort her, and she further denied pushing a spoon in the victim's mouth saying the victim bit down on the spoon.
Her lack of immediate acceptance of her crimes and her denial in the face of apparently overwhelming evidence was a matter of concern, the tribunal said.
Ms Robson was found guilty of professional misconduct and unfit to practise as a nurse. Her registration was cancelled without review for at least two years.
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