Nurse accused of forming relationship with father of newborn she was caring for

The nurse was the assigned carer for a baby girl and her family. Photo / 123RF

A nurse who began a relationship with the father of a newborn she was assigned to care for went on to ignore a message from his wife in which she threatened to kill herself after learning about their alleged affair.

The pair now have a child together and are due to be engaged, but maintain that their relationship began only after the nurse finished her support role for the family.

The wife, however, feels differently, and the case is now before the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal, where the nurse is facing two charges of professional misconduct.

“I felt betrayed by her in her role as a nurse,” the man’s ex-wife told the tribunal today.

“It is not a strict nurse relationship, but it is supposed to be about providing support to the whole family. I don’t think she had my best interests and wellbeing at heart.”

The tribunal has suppressed many details of the case, including the names of the parties involved, the witnesses, the location where the nurse and family were based and the organisation she worked for.

According to the documents submitted to the tribunal, the nurse was assigned as a carer for the newborn girl and her family in September 2018 and carried out six check-ups over the next year.

The Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal heard the wife sent a text to the nurse threatening to kill herself. Photo / Jeremy Wilkinson.

The girl’s mother said she quickly formed a friendly relationship with her nurse and suggested that her husband help out with some building work at her home at the end of 2019 - after the final check-in had been done.

However, come December the same year, she said her husband of 10 years came home and said he no longer had feelings for her. Suspicious of the amount of time her husband was spending doing work and other chores at all hours at her nurse’s house, she checked his phone records and discovered extensive communication between the pair.

“When I saw how frequently they were talking to each other, I immediately knew they’d been having an affair and told him to pack his bags,” she said.

Following this discovery, the woman then texted the nurse saying, “I want to f***en kill myself thanks a lot [sic]”, to which she received no reply.

Then in March 2020, the country went into lockdown as a response to Covid-19 and the man moved out of the family home and in with the nurse. He’d already been sleeping in a different room at the family home at that point.

“It felt incredibly disrespectful and [was] a slap in the face,” she said.

The woman then contacted the nurse’s employer, which commenced an investigation. The nurse resigned before the investigation could reach a conclusion.

A manager who handled the investigation into the complaint told the tribunal it was her view the nurse should have followed up the text message where her former patient had intimated an intention to commit suicide.

The key aspect of the case before the tribunal is whether the nurse commenced an intimate relationship with the woman’s husband while she was still officially acting as a support nurse for the baby and her family.

Harry Waalkens KC is representing the nurse before the tribunal.

Relationship

The nurse voluntarily chose to give evidence before the tribunal this afternoon and said that it was her understanding that by January 2020, the man had separated from his wife - three months after she conducted her last check on their newborn.

She said the man had begun working on her house along with her father and ex-partner and their friendship developed from there.

The woman said she’d had no conversations with the man about his relationship issues with his wife.

“I had no involvement in [those] matters or his decision to separate from her,” she said.

The nurse said that in March, 2020, the woman accused her publicly on Facebook of being in a relationship with her husband.

“I was upset about the message and called [her] to ask her to take it down. I told her that I wasn’t in a relationship with [the man] and that we were just good friends.”

It was after this she received the text message intimating suicide from the woman.

She said she contacted her manager, who told her not to engage but to ensure the woman was safe.

She said at the time of the lockdown, they were good friends, but maintained that the relationship was not intimate. She let the man move into her house because he had nowhere else to go.

She said the relationship became intimate the next month and that the lockdown meant things happened faster than they might have otherwise.

Following the formal commencement of the relationship, she said she was blindsided by the subsequent employment investigation and a suggestion that she should resign.

“I acknowledged during the investigation that with the benefit of hindsight, I should not have taken [the baby] on as a client as I had too many ties with [the mother] through our personal and social connections and that this blurred the professional relationship,” she said.

“It is not correct, however, that our relationship began while he and [the mother] were still together, or that our getting together was connected to being [the baby’s] nurse.”

The nurse’s lawyer, Harry Waalkens KC, said the man had a very different view of the stability and the status of the marriage compared to his wife and had indicated their relationship was over in December 2019.

Waalkens said the woman had simply been unable to reconcile that her relationship was over, and the basis of her complaint was to get back at her ex-husband and at his new partner.

“You blame all of this on [her] and are out to get at her,” he said, which the woman denied.

“You’re also using this as a means to get at [her ex] as well, aren’t you?” he asked, which she also denied.

Waalkens said the relationship occurred after his client had completed all of her professional responsibilities to the family.

“Personal relationships do develop inline as part of human nature … in all walks of life,” he said.

“In this case, a genuine relationship has developed and they’ve been together for more than three years.”

Jeremy Wilkinson is an Open Justice reporter based in Manawatū covering courts and justice issues with an interest in tribunals. He has been a journalist for nearly a decade and has worked for NZME since 2022.