Nurse Caught Using Dead Patient’s Card For Snacks Just Minutes After Death

A nurse who worked in the COVID ward of a UK hospital has been arrested after she was caught stealing a dead patient’s credit card to buy snacks just a few minutes after she passed away.

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The nurse in question, Ayesha Basharat, took her 83-year-old patient’s card after she died on January 24 at Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham, West Midlands. According to police, she used the card just 17 minutes after the time of death had been recorded.

The 23-year-old nurse previously admitted to theft and fraud by false representation. She used the card to make six purchases of £1 each on the hospital’s vending machine using the contactless pad, police said.

To make matters even worse, Basharat went on to make a similar purchase later in the day before trying again twice when she returned to work on January 28. That’s when the police say the card had been canceled, which is what led to her being arrested during her shift with the card still in her possession.

Officers said Basharat claimed to have found the card and confused it with her own, but they were different colors, and she clearly ignored hospital rules around patient lost property. For the crime, she was given two concurrent jail terms of five months each, also being suspended for 18 months.

Heartlands Hospital is run by the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, for which a spokesman said the nurse had been immediately suspended.

Det Con Andrew Snowdon described Basharat’s egregious act as an “abhorrent breach of trust” and said that the family was completely distraught.

“They were having to come to terms with the death of a loved one from Covid when they found the bank card missing,” he explained.