[2025] UKUT 238 (AAC)

AB, consistent with her case as understood at the time of the permission decision, maintained in oral evidence that the reason she did not want the service users to reposition on to mats, was that this required another service user (“PG”, as referred to in IP’s 25 December 2022 statement on page 72 of the bundle) to be “pinned” to the table (otherwise, that other service user would be of danger to the service users on their mats); AB maintained that she wanted to reposition the service users to their beds, instead; she maintained that she was a whistleblower in relation to the issue of “pinning” the other service user to the table.

In cross examination, AB accepted that her actions here involved her arguing with, and refusing to follow the instructions of, the registered nurse at the nursing home (MM); rather than repositioning the service users on mats in the communal area, AB wanted to take them to their respective beds, where they slept for the night, and monitor them remotely from there; AB also accepted that her conduct was at least in part because it was Christmas day (and so normal procedures could, in her opinion, be more relaxed).

As to the documentary evidence:

The evidence is clear that this incident involved AB refusing the instructions of the registered nurse at the nursing home where she was working, when the purpose of those instructions was to provide pressure sore relief for vulnerable adults; as to AB’s motivations for acting as she did, we do not accept her evidence that the main motivation for her conduct was concern for one service user, PG, who would need to be “pinned” to stop him possibly causing harm to the others when they were lying on mats (per the nurse’s instructions); whilst we accept this was part of AB’s motivation, her main motivation, on our weighing up of the evidence, was that she did not think the nurse’s instruction (to lay the service users on mats) was valid, on a one-off basis, because it was Christmas Day.It follows, in our view, that DBS did not make a mistake in finding that AB refused to reposition service users who were in need of pressure sore relief; nor was it a material mistake for DBS to have omitted making findings about AB’s motivations at the time as, even if it had made such findings, they would not have changed the outcome: AB’s main motivation (to make an exception for it being Christmas Day) was not one that would have caused DBS to change its view as to the safeguarding risk posed by AB; and, even to the extent that AB was motivated by concern about “pinning” PG, this was further evidence of AB (in the words of DBS’s ‘barring decision summary’, quoted at paragraph 13 above) “imposing her own perspective and methods of treatment of service users”; in other words, making a further factual finding about that element of AB’s motivation, would not have changed DBS’s decision.