A care home nurse failed to give medication to ten residents, including an end-of-life cancer patient potentially left in pain.

David Anthony Mott was working as an agency nurse covering a night shift at the height of the pandemic when the incident happened.

One patient, who was on painkillers for end-of-life cancer care could have been left in pain because of his inactions, a Nursing and Midwifery Council panel was told.

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It heard he failed to administer medication to ten patients on the night in question on September 7, 2020, when working a shift at the Ascot Nursing Home in Middlesbrough.

The error was spotted by another nurse who handed out tablets the next morning.

She said in evidence: “As I attended each resident, I noted the medication that should have been administered on the night shift was still in the blister packs.”

David Mott, who has been a registered nurse for 20 years, accepted he’d failed to hand out the drugs, but said he was “unfamiliar” with what he described as the “unique” way record charts were set out at the home. The misconduct panel said he had tried “to deflect blame onto other staff and onto the general management of the home”.

A tenth patient, referred to as Resident J, was on end-of-life cancer care and set to receive a slow dose of morphine through the night via a syringe.

But Mott, who is no longer working as a nurse, failed to check on the syringe, despite the manager of the care home showing him how to use it and telling him it needed checking every two hours earlier in the shift.

Again, the error was spotted the next morning by another nurse who said: “When I came into work on September 8, 2020, I checked Resident J's syringe driver and it had [stopped].

“The book we document our checks had not been written in. This meant Resident J did not get their Morphine and would have likely resulted in some pain which is serious as they were an end-of-life cancer patient.”

Mott claimed he checked the syringe driver during the night, but he wrote down no evidence of him doing so. The panel said his failure to do so prevented the resident from receiving pain relief.

Other allegations against Mott while working at the now-closed St Mark’s Nursing Home in Stockton in May of 2020 were found not proven.

The Nursing and Midwifery Council panel, chaired by Ms Deborah Jones, concluded his actions fell “significantly short of the standards expected of a registered nurse” and amounted to misconduct. It said that he had made “multiple failures with the potential to cause serious harm to residents”.

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It suspended Mr Mott for six months, however the nurse gave evidence saying he was very unlikely to return to nursing.

It added: “Mr Mott has not demonstrated any insight or reflection into his failings.”

The Northern Echo contacted Ascot Nursing Home for comment.