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A nurse who provided 12 fake medical certificates to her employer and blamed the documents on a computer virus has had her registration cancelled.
In a decision handed down by the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal (NCAT), Karinna Payne, a nurse with a regional NSW hospital, was found guilty of unsatisfactory professional conduct and professional misconduct after a complaint by the Health Care Complaints Commission.
The complaint was made after Ms Payne handed 12 medical certificates to her employer in October 2017.
The certificates were in response to her employer raising concerns about her 'excessive amount of sick leave without explanation or medical certificates'.
The medical certificates carried the letterhead of a medical centre that denied it had provided them.
Part of the complaint related to Ms Payne denying, on five occasions between November 2017 and February 2019, that the certificates were forged.
Instead, Ms Payne said the discrepancies on the certificates, which included dates of the doctors' signatures not aligning with dates of sick leave periods, were the result of a computer 'glitch'.
