A SENIOR care home director has been struck off after admitting shredding vital patient documents.
Elaine Cowling replaced them with forgeries.
Cowling, of Larbert, Stirlingshire, blamed her bosses for pressuring her.
A Care Commission report said the Arnothill House nursing home in Falkirk should be run with a nurse-patient ratio of one to four, instead of the one to seven it then had.
She said: “I was under pressure to come up with a case against the care commission’s one-to-four.
“My boss wasn’t happy with the commission’s report and he wasn’t going to be dictated to in his own home.”
Cowling,49,was working as director of nursing at Arnothill – now renamed Thorntree Mews – in April 2006 when she forged two nurses’ signatures on patients’records.
She was also caught shredding the original assessment records by two managers and replacing them with duplicates.
A conduct committee of the Nursing and Midwifery Council in Edinburgh heard yesterday that the records contained important patient dependency scores.
They dictated the level of care each patient required.
The higher the score, the higher the level of care .
Cowling changed three patients’depency scores.
In evidence, Cowling admitted she had put the patients’health at risk when she made the changes.
She was struck off for five years.
(c) 2008 Daily Record; Glasgow (UK). Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.
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