A Tasmanian nurse has been permanently banned from caring for people after gross misconduct which included stealing money from a dying hospital patient. Over a four-year period, mostly in South Australia, Danielle Maree Jones committed eight acts of professional misconduct. The SA Health Practitioners Tribunal found she forged registration certificates, injected patients with drugs against direct orders, stole money from two hospital patients and made false claims to investigators. Jones, who subsequently relocated to Tasmania, was also found to have lied about a prior suspension when she applied for nurses registration in Hobart in 2015. In handing down its decision the tribunal described Jones’s actions as a “grave departure from the standards expected of a professional nurse”. Her failure to participate in the proceedings against her prompted this rebuke from tribunal president Michael Ardlie: “She has no remorse or insight into her behaviour and clearly she is not a fit and proper person to be registered.” “The respondent is reprimanded in the strongest possible terms,” he said. The tribunal heard that while working at Adelaide’s Ashford Hospital in 2011 as a student nurse Jones injected a patient with blood-thinning drug clexane against specific directions. In 2013 at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, also in Adelaide, Jones stole from two female patients. One of the patients caught Jones in the act of stealing $700 from her wallet. On the same day she was caught stealing $20 from a patient’s wallet she told the woman, who died a few weeks later, that her son must have taken it home. The tribunal permanently cancelled Jones’s registration as a nurse and banned her from ever applying for registration. It expanded the ban to include ambulance services after learning Jones was attempting to qualify as a paramedic. Jones’s last place of practice was listed as Devonport. A Health Department spokesman said Jones had not been employed by the health service in Tasmania.
