The least that we should expect from the management of the NHS is that they hire people who are competent at their job as well as being sane and balanced. Nobody entering a hospital should worry about whether their treatment would be compromised because a doctor or a nurse which the hospital has hired believes in guff like lizard aliens, electromagnetic mind control or people being remotely hypnotised to fart. Unfortunately one NHS hospital did just that. They hired a nurse with bizarre beliefs who, when she refused the very reasonable request to seek help with her delusion from a psychiatrist, sacked her.
This particular nurse believed that she was being subjected to hypnotism from her bosses working via the heating and air conditioning system that made her uncontrollably fart.
The Metro newspaper said:
A nurse unsuccessfully sued the NHS after claiming she was being ‘experimented upon’ at work causing her to fart against her will.
Xandra Samson said hypnosis was being used on her at Ealing Hospital, London.
Poor heating and ventilation at the acute medical unit altered her state of consciousness and allowed bosses to ‘control’ employees, she claimed.
She refused to cooperate with psychiatric help and was sacked in December 2019.
Nurse Samson believed that her bosses were making her fart uncontrollably in order to disturb her and make her easier to ‘control’. Her line management tried to deal with her delusions as best they could and referred her to a psychiatrist. However she refused and continued to spout her tin foil hat delusions and was therefore fired from her job. Unfortunately the sacking did not remove Nurse Samson’s delusions and she took the hospital to the Industrial Tribunal where she promptly lost her case.
Whilst this is a particularly extreme case of a healthcare worker possessing and expressing bizarre beliefs, it may not be the only case of the NHS employing loony tunes staff. I once encountered a healthcare assistant attending a home visit to an elderly and disabled relative who advised the patient that drinking Vicks Vapour Rub (which is strictly for external use only) mixed with hot water was a good cure for a chest infection. Thankfully the relative saw that advice for what it was which was bollocks, but examples of piss poor practise like this one and the farting nurse case do make me wonder just how many other odd and deluded individuals with equally odd and deluded beliefs are being employed by the NHS?
Stories like the farting nurse with her mind control delusions along with other cases of misbehaving healthcare staff do make me wonder whether the NHS is really hiring the best and brightest among us? It would not surprise me one bit to find that NHS is hiring potentially dangerous oddballs and only dealing with them when their oddities get too obvious to ignore.
It might not have been the bosses but the lizard aliens. Actually, I think the latter are more likely to be trying to control world leaders but perhaps this “experiment” was a leisure-time activity. Or maybe the NHS Ealing bosses are working for them (“We will eat you last”) and uncontrollable farting is being tested for its pandemic potential if humans become too nosy about the lizard aliens in future? I wonder if Ms Samson checked her diet.
LOL nice one! The logical way that the nurse could have approached her flatulence problem would be to look at her diet to see if that was causing her problem. The illogical and frankly fraggly way to look at this issue was to blame hypnotic mind control for her farting.