Penelope Williams, a nurse in the United Kingdom, was fired from her job at a hospital after she had sex with a patient in the parking lot in Wrexham, Wales and he died of a heart attack.
Williams was fired after the hospital learned she had maintained an affair with a patient for over a year, ending when the man died following a sexual encounter, Fox reports.
According to the report, the man, known as patient A, was receiving dialysis treatment, and he died of a heart attack during the late-night meeting in January last year.
Williams, 42, failed to call for an ambulance after the patient collapsed in the back of his car. He later died from “heart failure and chronic kidney disease triggered by a medical episode.”
The episode triggered an investigation and hearing before a Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) fitness-to-practice panel, which heard testimony that Williams had ignored advice from colleagues who had urged her to call an ambulance.
Patient A had met Williams through work, with Williams helping to treat him for his condition. When emergency personnel eventually arrived, they found Patient A partially naked and unresponsive.
Williams had called a colleague instead of emergency personnel, and the colleague urged her to immediately call an ambulance, only for Williams to delay in doing so. She was “crying and distressed and asking for help as she tried to explain that someone had died.”
The colleague ended up calling an ambulance instead and Patient A was found dead upon the arrival of the medical team.
A disciplinary hearing found that the pair had had a year-long sexual relationship. During the late-night tryst with Williams, he suffered a heart attack with his trousers around his ankles.
Williams initially told police and a paramedic that she had gone to meet with him after he had messaged her on Facebook that he felt unwell. She claimed she had spent only about “30 to 45 minutes” in the back of his car “just talking,” according to The Telegraph.
“She further explained that [the patient] started groaning and suddenly died,” she had testified at an initial February hearing.
She later admitted to the ongoing relationship and that she had met up with him that night for a sexual encounter. Her admission at a later hearing in May resulted in her final dismissal from her job.
The board determined that Williams had “brought the nursing profession into disrepute,” The New York Post reports.
Williams hid her 12-month affair with the man despite knowing that he was a dialysis patient under her at Wrexham Maelor Hospital.
