What happened
On 8 June 2021 a band 5 staff nurse was providing care to a patient on an adult medical ward at University Hospital Llandough, in the Cardiff and Vale University Health Board area.
The patient was resisting care. She bent his thumb backwards towards his wrist to stop him. She called him a “naughty boy”.
On 29 September 2021, caring for a second patient, she forcefully pushed him onto a bed, put her hand over his face to keep him still, and kicked him in the shin.
The outcome
She admitted the thumb-bending as an incorrect restraint technique and as physically abusive, and admitted the charges concerning the second patient. The remark was proved after evidence, the panel holding the words derogatory towards a vulnerable adult.
At a hearing on 24 September 2025 the Nursing and Midwifery Council found her fitness to practise impaired and removed her from the register.
No criminal proceedings are recorded in the decision.
What went wrong
This is a case about small acts, and it is worth being precise about why they matter.
Bending a thumb towards the wrist is a pain-compliance technique. It works by causing pain until the person complies, and in a healthcare setting it is treated as an unauthorised restraint: a clinical ward is not a setting where staff may hurt a patient into accepting care. The technique is also a joint injury waiting to happen, particularly in an older person.
A hand over the face is worse: it restricts airway and vision at once, on a hospital bed, in a bay that may be curtained. The kick to the shin is a strike.
The remark is not a side issue. “Naughty boy” to an adult patient tells you what the nurse believed she was managing: not a frightened person resisting care, but a child being disobedient. That belief is what makes hands the obvious tool.
What it teaches
Medical wards are where restraint is least recognised and most improvised: no restraint team, often no trained colleagues, and a dressing or a tablet that has to go in. The fallback is whatever the individual nurse knows.
So the standard has to be stated plainly here: if a patient resists care, the options are to stop, wait, get help, explain, or accept that the care does not happen now. Force to complete a task is not one of them, and pain compliance has no place on a medical ward.
The second lesson is about who notices. Two incidents three months apart, on the same ward, by the same nurse, both abusive in ways a colleague nearby would have seen. The regulator heard about them; the question is what your staff are expected to do at the time.
Questions for the room
- A patient pulls their arm away during a dressing. What are your staff actually trained to do in that second?
- Which techniques in your service work by causing pain, and who authorised them?
- A colleague calls an adult patient “naughty”. What does that tell you, and what do you say?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: confirmed. The Nursing and Midwifery Council’s reasons document of 24 September 2025 was read, and the facts above are taken from it, including the particulars she admitted.
The nurse is not named. She was not convicted of an offence, and the standing rule for this casebook is that staff are named only where a criminal conviction exists. The decision is public and cited below.
The record does not describe the patients beyond the fact that they were adults receiving care on a medical ward, and this page does not add to that.
Sources
Our restraint reduction training covers what to do when a patient refuses care, including the techniques that must never be used to complete a task.
Reviewed 20 October 2026.