TRIGGER WARNING: This article discusses suicide
A tribunal has found four nurses guilty of professional misconduct, after an Indigenous man they were supposed to be observing took his own life in 2017.
The body of the 49-year-old father was discovered in the morning of May 27. He had been admitted to an acute mental health ward several days previously, and was placed under level 3 observation, meaning nurses were required to check on him every half an hour.
The tribunal found that the nurses recorded the patient as settled or sleeping in their shift reports, but had not actually checked on the man.
Four mental health nurses have been deregistered after an indigenous patient with a history of self-harm killed himself on their night shift at a large Sydney hospital.
Staff were required to take observations every 30 minutes, but a coroner found the patient could have been dead from between two and eight hours before he was found at 7.30 am on May 27, 2017.
Days earlier the patient told a psychiatric registrar he needed to make a will because he would not be here in a week and he had nothing left .
Four nurses have been found guilty of professional misconduct after a mentally ill man, 49, with a recent history of suicide attempts and depression, killed himself on their watch