By Grâçia Ada Obi
A hospital which paid nearly £95,000 in wages to a fraudulent nurse has said it will attempt to get some of the money back from her.
Tanya Nasir, 45, was appointed as the neonatal ward manager at The Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend in 2019, but she lied about her qualifications and experience.
She was sentenced to five years in prison on Thursday after being found guilty of nine counts of fraud and fraud by false representation.
Nasir is also expected to be removed from the register of nurses by the regulatory body The Nursing and Midwifery Council.
Nasir worked at the unit for five months before suspicions were raised. She was suspended and later resigned.
Her sentencing hearing was told she earned a total of £94,941.10 from Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board, as well as a further nearly £115,000 across two roles at The Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in London, which she also secured fraudulently.
A Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA) hearing is due to be held next March and it is thought she will be able to keep some of the earnings, but not the full salary of a qualified Band 7 neonatal ward manager.
Nasir from Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, claimed to have specialist clinical and academic qualifications.
She said she was an Army Reserve medic who had served in Afghanistan and claimed to have taken part in humanitarian missions in Kosovo, Syria and Kenya. These were all lies.
She gained an adult nursing qualification in 2014, but claimed to have qualified four years earlier in 2010, and created false certificates to support her story.
When she went to work in the paediatric unit at Hillingdon, she told her new colleagues she had worked in intensive care at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for five years.
When she made the claims again during her interviews with NHS counter fraud investigators, they told her HMRC had no record of her ever paying tax on a salary for working there.
Her reply was that she had volunteered there – for five years.
Tanya Nasir studied at Buckinghamshire New University, but she had convictions for benefit fraud and was sentenced to unpaid work while she was studying.
When the university found out, they asked why she had not disclosed it as she was required to.
She said she had spoken to the probation service who said she did not have to disclose it. She provided a copy of a fake letter to prove the point.
It was the paediatric matron in Bridgend who spotted the lie about her qualification date, while checking her registration code which all nurses, midwives and nurse associates must have to work in the UK.
The code revealed her real qualification date, making Nasir – the ward manager with a “World’s Best Nurse” ornament on her desk – one of the least qualified members of the unit staff.
The investigation which followed uncovered a complex web of lies.
Her claims of serving in the “Royal British Army”, as she incorrectly called it, had led her to demand every summer off to attend training camps.
She did not care about what happened to her colleagues who had to cover for her, many of whom also had children.
She would send photos to her colleagues back home, telling them she was in Afghanistan, Cyprus or Kenya.
One photograph, which she said was taken in Kenya, showed her in uniform in an office – with a very British looking drainpipe through the double-glazed window behind her.
At the time, her friends saw no reason to doubt her, with one even jokingly calling her “ma’am” in a WhatsApp message.
One former colleague said : “She would talk about the Army all the time, it would come up in lots of conversations.
“She would say she couldn’t come to work because she was in Afghanistan, or Kenya.”
And, when she was at work, colleagues said she wanted people to think she was a hero, for combining her nursing and Army reserve careers with life as a single mum who had fled an abusive relationship.
Another former colleague said: “The only way I can describe her is that she made people feel sorry for her because of her past.
“She used to really try to intimidate junior members of staff. She would question them about their clinical practice while they were doing it.
“Not because they were wrong, she was doing it to make them feel like they were doing something wrong and equally so she could learn through it as well.”
But Nasir did not have the clinical skills she claimed to have including, crucially, paediatric resuscitation.
NHS counter fraud investigators Neil Jones and Beverley Jones, who are both former police officers, led the investigation.
They said they had never met anyone like Tanya Nasir.
“She was belligerent in her answers. She was determined to stick to the fact that she had done nothing wrong at all,” said Ms Jones.
“It was astounding really, the lies that she told and how she maintained those lies throughout the course of the investigation and the trial here.”
In one recorded interview, Mr Jones said: “We’ve clearly established that you’ve never served in any capacity in the Army as an officer, a regular soldier or a reservist. There’s clear unequivocal witness evidence to these facts.”
He asked Nasir if she agreed that some of the information she had provided in her application forms was “fraudulent”, to which she simply responded: “No.”
In another interview, Ms Jones asked why all the charities she claimed to have worked with on overseas humanitarian missions had never heard of her.
Nasir responded: “There isn’t a reasonable explanation. At the end of the day, I can only give an account of what I’ve done. I can’t give an account of their record keeping.”
At one point, she was asked for her military service number and said she could not recall it. She also could not remember which airport she flew to Basra in Iraq from, suggesting Heathrow, Stansted or Gatwick.
But perhaps the most telling moment in those interviews was when she was asked about her qualifications.
Nasir claimed to have degrees in subjects including physics and astrophysics, as well as qualifications in operating theatre technique, leadership, teaching and many more.
Asked why none of the universities had any record of her, she said: “I don’t know… all I can tell you is that if I was going to pretend to have qualifications, there are better paid jobs than nursing.”
Nasir’s defence was twofold – she was a qualified nurse and no babies died or were injured.
Her barrister told the court she had struggled to support herself since her arrest, living on Universal Credit and foodbanks.
He said she was sacked from a job in a pharmacy after reports of her preliminary court appearances reached her employer.
The court was also told she had endured a difficult start to life, a deeply unhappy childhood and periods in the care system – something not touched upon at all during her five-week trial.
Following her sentencing, a prison van arrived to take Nasir to prison.
Despite her calm, smiling exit from the dock just an hour before, she was walked to the van with her coat over her head.
