LAZY NURSE KILLED PATIENT WITH DRUG
A care home nurse was yesterday convicted of drugging a frail, elderly patient to death because she was too lazy to look after her.Alison Firth, who is married with a four-year-old daughter, was condemned by detectives as "evil and a disgrace to her profession" after a judge jailed her for life.
Unable to stick at a job, with 27 nursing posts in 16 years, she was described as inherently lazy by a colleague during the murder trial at Newcastle upon Tyne crown court.
Mr Justice Bell told her she "could not be bothered" to keep her victim alive.
The court had heard that she admitted giving a sedative overdose to 84-year-old Alice Grant, who was in her care at Aidan House residential home in Gateshead after suffering two strokes.
She then rang the dying woman's son, Tommy Grant, to tell him to come to the home, and told him: "Your mother's not 'alf bad." Mrs Firth, 36, of Kingston Park, Newcastle, claimed that she could not remember if she had been so exasperated with Mrs Grant that she killed her, or whether she had just hoped to ease the elderly woman's suffering.
The court was told that Mrs Grant, who was bedridden and could no longer speak, had senile dementia after the strokes and needed up to half-an-hour's demanding care from staff every two hours.
Mr Justice Bell told Mrs Firth that she had clearly decided that the work involved was not worth it.
"You may have also taken the view she was losing little by dying sooner rather than later," he said.
"But you murdered Mrs Grant largely because you didn't want to be put to the trouble of caring for her in the future." Firth, who injected Mrs Grant with the sedative Heminievrin and then sprayed the room with freshener to mask the drug's smell, also tried to dupe police with stories of an alleged hate campaign against her during their investigation.
She claimed that her family had been sent hate mail, suffered attempted arson attacks and had a coffin-shaped card placed on their car.
But covert surveillance showed that she had staged the incidents herself while trying to blame them on colleagues at Aidan House, which is run by the Manor House Care group and now a non-nursing residential home.
The head of the inquiry, Detective Superintendent Chris Symonds, said afterwards: "This verdict demonstrates that elderly people have the protection of the law, notwithstanding the fact that they are extremely ill and in the last stages of their natural life."
