Netflix has dropped a gripping new series that follows a nurse who begins to suspect a colleague of hiding a chilling secret. Danish crime drama The Nurse centres on rookie nurse Pernille Kurzmann as she begins a new job in a hospital in Denmark and believes a top nurse is killing her patients.
Its official synopsis reads: “One early morning in March 2015, the Danish police received a call from a nurse at Nykøbing Falster Hospital. She suspects her close colleague of deliberately killing patients and fears that it has just happened again.
“Soon a murder case unfolds like never seen before in Danish legal history. Several co-workers are now telling the police that they also suspect the nurse has poisoned patients, and some even tell that they have been walking around with this suspicion for several years.”
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The four-part series stars Josephine Park as Christina Aistrup Hansen, the nurse suspected of killing patients, and Fanny Louise Bernth as Kurzmann, the new nurse who brought the crimes to light. But is The Nurse based on a true story?
Is The Nurse based on a true story?
The Nurse is based on the non-fiction book The Nurse: The True Story Behind One of Scandinavia’s Most Notorious Criminal Trials by Kristian Corfixen. The book recounts the shocking true story of Danish nurse Christina Aistrup Hansen, who worked at the Nykøbing Falster Hospital on the outskirts of Denmark.
After graduating from medical school, Pernille Kurzmann joined the hospital staff and soon befriended Hansen. According to Netflix, Hansen was the hospital’s top nurse and adored by all.
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But any time she worked a night shift, patients who seemed stable would suddenly nose-dive and nearly die while Hansen would heroically bring them back – most of the time. When Hansen’s patients kept dying, Kurzmann became suspicious that the beloved nurse had a hand in their deaths.
In 2016, after Kurzmann embarked on her own investigation and uncovered the heinous crimes, Hansen was arrested and charged with three counts of murder and one count of attempted manslaughter. The disgraced nurse faced life in prison.
During her trial, the court heard that Hansen had given the patients lethal doses of morphine and diazepam. As reported by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, the prosecution argued that the motive for her crimes was linked to a personality disorder.
Hansen, aged 31 at the time of her trial, suffered from a so-called histrionic personality disorder, prosecutor Michael Boelsen said. The disorder is characterised by traits including “superficiality”, “egocentricity” and “persistent search for excitement in existence.”
Manipulative behaviour is also typical of the disorder, and Hansen was found to “score unusually high on the unreliability scale”. In May 2017, Hansen was convicted of attempted manslaughter of the four patients as the court could not determine that the injections were the direct cause of death.
The former nurse was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
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