A nurse has been struck off for misconduct at a Nursing and Midwifery Council hearing 20-21st August, 2018. 

 

Rebecca Briggs had been employed as an agency nurse for the Pennine Foundation Care Trust between August 2016 and January 2017. She had worked as an out-of-hours district nurse for Bealey Community Hospital, supporting patients overnight (8pm to 8am) in their own homes.

 

As an agency nurse, Briggs had to fill in timesheets with her dates and hours of work and get these signed and authorised by another member of staff at the hospital before the timesheet could be faxed to her agency employers.

 

In December, 2016, one of her hospital colleagues noticed that Briggs’ timesheet was signed with the colleague’s name and signature. However, the colleague had never worked a shift with her, and so would never have signed off on her sheets.

When the issue was raised, five more of Brigg’s timesheets were found with the same forgery on them.

 

The trust accepted that Briggs did actually work the hours on the six timesheets. However, her actions in forging the signature and submitting them to the agency showed her dishonesty. She was sacked from the trust.

 

In December, 2016, she had her registration suspended by the NMC for eight months on a different matter.

 

In April, 2017, Briggs applied for a healthcare assistant job at a Rochdale GP surgery, but did not mention that she was currently suspended as a nurse, or explain why she had left her last role.

 

Briggs emailed the NMC previous to the hearing, and said “I do not deny any of the charges.” The NMC accepted this as a formal admission.

 

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If the Pennine Foundation Care Trust had been using a more modern form of attendance monitoring, then this very simple fraud could not have taken place. 

 

Here at Time and Attendance North West, we can provide a mobile Self Service Module smartphone app to go alongside the main Win.TA.NET software. This would be ideal for someone like Rebecca, who has to go out in the community on her own. 

 

The SSM enables employees to clock in and out or book on and off jobs using their mobile phone. This data is then sent to the central system. 

 

(If the employee is in an area with no signal, they can still clock in and out, as the app will cache the inputs and synchronise them when connection is restored. This is ideal for someone whose role involves work in rural or particularly hilly villages.)

 

The manager can then view that clocking data, and if the optional GPS tagging is turned on they can even view a map of where their employee’s phone was, just to make sure that they were where they were supposed to be. 

 

This level of authentication means that there would be no need for a co-worker to confirm the hours worked, as it would be clearly visible to the manager.

 

Employees can see their own clocking timesheets, so could not pretend to be unaware of any discrepancies. 

 

The role based security means that you can choose which features employees can have access to. See a full list of available features:

 

• Clock IN or OUT and book ON or OFF jobs (with options for GPS tagging)

• Clock OUT with using a reason code

• View previous clockings, add missing clockings or amend existing ones

• Request & cancel a period of absence/holiday

• Receive a notification when absence requests are authorised or denied

• View the status of your absence requests and clocking amendments

• View your current & remaining holiday entitlement

• View you absence planner for any year

• View your current flexitime balance, flexitime history and request adjustments to your flexi balance

• Queue clockings when the mobile device does not have internet access.