A nurse spent hours surfing hundreds of sites look
A nurse spent hours surfing hundreds of sites looking for depraved and offensive material while caring for sick children, a hearing was told today.
(Fri)
Stephen Truscott, 31, logged in to 700 sites featuring scenes of death, mutilation and pornography.
The Nursing and Midwifery Council was told Truscott
looked at more than 1000 images either of an offensive or sexually explicit nature.
He also accessed suicide websites and pictures of diseased people on a computer donated to the University College London Hospital (UCLH) by a charity.
One image showed a young woman with a shotgun in her mouth while others featured scenes of rape and lesbian activity.
Truscott viewed the sites between March 7 and March 15 last year while he worked on the Middlesex Adolescent Unit, part of the UCLH NHS Trust.
The 14-bed facility cares for teenagers with ‘complex and often life threatening’ illnesses.
Truscott looked at the images at a computer located in a treatment room near his office.
He was caught after IT experts spotted that on 725 occasions somebody had tried to enter websites that were banned by a firewall system.
The nurse was caught as he sat in front of the computer by a matron following a tip-off from IT workers who were monitoring the computer from remote.
In front of him was a list of bizarre and sexually explicit websites.
Robert Girling, for the NMC, told the hearing: ‘He continued to go back again and again night after night, surfing the net, accessing these images at a time when he was supposed to be the nurse in charge of an adolescent unit.
‘He was deliberately setting himself adrift on a sea of internet porn out there.
‘He was doing it on a hospital computer located at the heart of a unit looking after sick girls and boys.
‘
The committee was told Truscott had visited sites such as www.
uglypeople.
com and www.
celebsforfree.
com.
Mr Girling said he also accessed www.
spooned.
com which has a disclaimer that reads: ‘We have sick people, death, raw gore, smashed up faces, diseases, some other whacky s–t’.
Another site he visited was www.
suicidegirls.
com.
‘There was an image of what appeared to be a young woman with a shotgun in her mouth,’ said Mr Girling.
Other pictures the nurse viewed had such titles as ‘lesbian jpeg’ and ‘upskirt jpeg’.
He also surfed sites such as www.
triplexceleb.
com and www.
reelcastingcouch.
com.
Mr Girling said that Truscott had ignored warning signs that appeared on the computer when he tried to access the banned sites.
The matter was investigated by Scotland Yard’s Vice Squad but no action was taken because the material was of an adult nature.
The committee was told Truscott had visited 587 websites on more than one occasion.
He claimed that he had only accidentally accessed a site and ‘could not get out of it’.
But Truscott admitted: ‘Most nights I was on the computer I usually looked at piercing and tattoo sites and weird stuff.
‘
Truscott, from Hackney, was sacked from his job following a disciplinary hearing.
Prior to his work at the UCLH he had worked on the teenage unit at Frimley Park Hospital in Surrey.
He admits a charge of using the hospital computer to access sexually explict and offensive websites.
The committee found him guilty of misconduct and he will hear his fate later.
Committee chair Elizabeth Hacket-Pain told him: ‘This abuse of hospital equipment undermines public trust and confidence in the profession.
‘
The hearing continues.
ends
