PEOPLES DAILY, WEDNESday, may 20, 2015
Page 39
Strange World
How Filipino psychopath who poisoned 22 patients used forged qualifications to get job in UK hospital By Stephen Wright In Manila and James Tozer for the Daily Mail
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ressure was growing last night for an inquiry into vetting failures that allowed a nurse to kill two patients and poison scores more in an NHS hospital. Victorino Chua, a 49-yearold father of two, attacked the very people he was supposed to be caring for. At the height of his poisoning spree, police even considered shutting down Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport. Police believe the ‘narcissistic psychopath’ from the Philippines used forged qualifications to register as a nurse here. They even suspect that someone might have sat his nursing exam for him in his homeland. Ahead of Chua’s sentencing today there were calls for a public inquiry and a review of how foreign nurses are recruited. It can also be revealed that: •Chua graduated from a nursing college now shut down amid concerns about its poor standards and finances; •Lax vetting – including acceptance of photocopied documents – allowed him to register as a nurse in the UK; •No checks were made with his employers at the Philippines hospital which he left after being accused of theft; •Detectives fear Chua may have claimed the lives of other patients both here and in the Philippines; •The trade in fake nursing qualifications that can be bought for as little as £43; •Occupational therapists at Stepping Hill Hospital failed to raise concerns about Chua’s deteriorating mental state in the run-up to the poisonings; •Victims of the poisonings are in line for millions of pounds in compensation payments from Chua’s NHS hospital trust; •Chua, who became a British citizen in 2008, could use human rights laws to avoid deportation. Last night, the recently retired prosecutor who helped bring Chua to justice said he believes there could be hundreds of nurses using fake qualifications in UK hospitals. Nazir Afzal told BBC North West: ‘In all my 24 years as a prosecutor, I have never escalated concerns to another government department except in this case. I do not know whether there were hundreds or thousands or dozens. ‘What I do know is the opportunities were there for them to lie about their qualifications, to obtain them fraudulently, and to cover up their disciplinary matters. It must be, for all patients, extremely worrying and desperately concerning.’ Kath Murray, 57, a civil servant who has suffered years of health problems as a result of being given a drip contaminated with insulin by Chua, described herself as a ‘living victim’ of the poisoner. Verdicts: Nurse Victorino Chua has been found guilty by a jury at Manchester Crown Court of
murdering and poisoning hospital patients at Stepping Hill Hospital Verdicts: Nurse Victorino Chua has been found guilty by a jury at Manchester Crown Court of murdering and poisoning hospital patients at Stepping Hill Hospital ‘How could they let someone like that work in a hospital, as a nurse?’ she demanded yesterday. ‘He was meant to be caring for people, yet he had all that anger inside him.’ Stephen Jones, a clinical negligence specialist at law firm Slater and Gordon which is representing several of those affected, said patients and their families could be entitled to significant damages from Stockport NHS Foundation Trust. Chua injected insulin into saline bags and ampoules while working on two wards at Stepping Hill Hospital in June and July 2011. These were then unwittingly used by other nurses on the ward – leading to a series of insulin overdoses to mainly elderly victims. Two patients, Tracey Arden, 44 and Derek Weaver, 83, suffered agonising deaths and a third, Grant Misell, 41, was left brain damaged as the insulin overdoses starved the victims’ brains of oxygen. Deception: Victorino Chua in the stock room where he put back medicine he had injected with insulin at Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport, which killed two and injured 20 more Deception: Victorino Chua in the stock room where he put back medicine he had injected with insulin at Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport, which killed two and injured 20 more Defence: Hospital bosses have denied they could have done anything to stop Chua because they dealt with medicines in the same way other hospitals do Defence: Hospital bosses have denied they could have done anything to stop Chua because they dealt with medicines in the same way other hospitals do Calls To Curb The Rush Of Foreign Recruits Demands for an inquiry into foreign nurse recruitment intensified last night in the aftermath of the Chua scandal. Hospitals have spent £1million in three years hiring nurses from 16 countries including the Philippines, Portugal, Romania, Lithuania, Greece, Poland, Sweden, Italy, India, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The NHS is now so dependent on foreign nurses that half of hospital trusts have staged recruitment drives overseas since 2012 and there are 23,000 Filipino nurses on the UK register. Freedom of Information responses also reveal that managers are so desperate to fill vacancies that they are failing to test the nurses’ English properly. Instead, they rely on the judgement of recruitment agencies. The former chief prosecutor in the North West, Nazir Afzal, told BBC North West that during the Chua investigation
Training: Killer nurse Victorino Chua in the Phillippines his team wrote to Home Office and Health Department officials and nursing regulators raising their concerns about potentially fraudulent qualifications. He said: ‘The concerns related to the robustness... of the qualification and training regime that they had in the Philippines at that time.’ Katherine Murphy of the Patients Association said: ‘If we do employ nurses from other countries, we must ensure that they are fully qualified and competent to carry out their duties and that they are competent enough in English to effectively communicate.’ One of Chua’s victims, Kath Murray, 57, backed calls for an inquiry into foreign recruitment. .Chua was convicted at Manchester Crown Court yesterday of two murders, 22 counts of attempted grievous bodily harm, one count of grievous bodily harm, seven attempts of administering poison and one count of administering poison. Det Supt Simon Barraclough, who led the investigation, said: ‘I have no confidence in the qualifications he has provided via the Professional Regulation Commission (which verifies the qualifications of nurses).’
Stepping Hill accepted Chua without exhaustive checks into his background in 2009 – seven years after he arrived in the UK. Publicly available documents held at the Regional Trial Court of Manila show that in 2000 Chua was accused of stealing 1,070 Philippines pesos, equivalent to about £18, from the
city’s Metropolitan Hospital, where he worked. For 18 months, the case hung over Chua before the allegations of ‘qualified theft’ were dismissed on February 7 2002. Two weeks later, on February 21, Chua flew to London, via Amsterdam, to start a new life in the UK. There’s a devil inside me, killer nurse confessed Victorino Chua penned what he called a ‘bitter nurse confession’ in which he spelt out ‘how an angel can turn into an evil person’. In the extraordinary document released yesterday, he wrote: ‘They thought I’m a nice person but there is a devil in me.’ Over 13 rambling pages, the Filipino killer nurse said he might explode at any time, adding: ‘If I will be pushed, they gonna be sorry.’ Dependant on painkillers, sleeping tablets and antidepressants, Chua also wrote he sometimes felt like killing himself, but feared he would ‘go straight to hell no questions asked’. The document was found in a kitchen drawer at his home in Stockport after he was arrested in January 2012. Jurors were told how in hard-tofollow, broken English, written in scrawling capital letters, he recounts the story of his life, beginning: ‘My name is Victorino Domingo Chua.’ In the document, the father of two said he was writing ‘in case something happen to me (so) my family can continue my case or can tell somebody to look at it and work out how an angel turn to an evil person’. He added: ‘The bitter nurse confession. Got lots to tell but I just take it to my grave. My family will make history here in England.’ In a later addition to the document, dated December 2010, Chua described how he could control the number of painkillers he took for back and knee pain when he was at home – but at work he ‘can’t help it to take more than the limit’.
Born Victorino Domingo Chua (pictured far right) on October 30, 1965, he was one of six children born to Juanita, now 65, and his father a department store manager of mixed Filipino/Chinese descent