Patience Kandenga
Introduction
Patience Kandenga is a registered nurse who was suspended for nine months by the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) on 12 March 2026, at the end of a Fitness to Practise Committee hearing that ran from 13 August 2025. The panel found that on 22–23 March 2021, while caring for a vulnerable child at home, she created inaccurate records, failed to follow the child’s care plan, used her personal mobile phone, slept while on a waking shift, and acted dishonestly about the records she created. Her fitness to practise was found currently impaired, and a nine-month suspension order with a review was imposed, along with an 18-month interim suspension covering the appeal period .
Background Information
The charges concerning Patient A — the vulnerable child — described a night’s worth of care that existed more fully on paper than in fact. The inaccurate records covered water administration, oxygen saturations and heart rate monitoring, oxygen delivery, vital sign observations, an entry of “no clinical concerns” when seizures occurred, and medication checks. The poor care found alongside them included insufficient water, removal of the child’s continuous oxygen and heart-rate monitor, inadequate vital sign observations, sleeping while on waking duty, use of her personal mobile phone, and failure to follow the seizure care plan .
Further charges covered the record she then wrote: a failure to make accurate contemporaneous records, which the panel found dishonest in respect of charge 1a. Additional proved charges concerned administering expired medication, poor manual-handling practices, and failing to wear a mask or gloves. In relation to a second patient, Patient B, between December 2020 and April 2021, she failed to complete a prescribed safety checklist and failed to report out-of-stock medication .
The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation
Adjudicated (regulatory). The findings below were made by an NMC panel on the balance of probabilities — a civil standard, not a criminal conviction. Some charges were proved by admission, others on disputed facts, and several were not proved.
The panel found the proved facts amounted to misconduct and that Kandenga’s fitness to practise was currently impaired on both public-protection and public-interest grounds. Its balancing finding was narrow on dishonesty: the panel noted that her dishonesty “was confined to one patient on one shift” — a limiting framing — while still finding limited insight, multiple and deliberate breaches of the Code, a breach of trust, and a risk of harm to a vulnerable child .
The aggravating features centred on who Patient A was: a vulnerable child, dependent on the night care the panel found she did not deliver and then recorded inaccurately. The dishonesty finding attached to the records themselves — the paperwork saying the observations and oxygen delivery happened that the panel found did not .
Mitigation was partial but real: early admission of some facts, some insight and remorse, training courses and certificates, oral evidence about how she would avoid similar failings, and two reflective pieces relevant to the regulatory concerns. The panel nonetheless found remediation incomplete .
Charges found not proved included 1a)vi), 1d) and 3b) — the panel separated what it could prove from what it could not, rather than accepting the charge list wholesale .
Public Reaction and Consequences
The outcome is a nine-month suspension with a review, plus the 18-month interim suspension covering the appeal period. The sanction sits between the six-month orders given for single-incident misconduct and the twelve-month orders given where dishonesty is broader — the panel expressly confined the dishonesty finding in reaching it .
The case is recorded in MedicWatch’s listing of nurses suspended in 2026. No public statement from Kandenga or from the care provider appears in the fetched record beyond the determination itself .
Current Status
Kandenga is a suspended nurse. The nine-month suspension was imposed on 12 March 2026 with a review attached, and the interim order covers the appeal window. The record she must answer at review is specific: the shift of 22–23 March 2021, the records she wrote about it, and the finding that her account of that shift was dishonest .
Impact on Their Career/Life
The case’s structure does the reputational work: a nurse alone with a vulnerable child overnight, a care plan not followed, monitors removed, sleep taken on a waking shift — and then a record set claiming observations and care that the panel found did not happen. The dishonesty finding is confined, as the panel said, but it is the part that defines the case, because it converts a night of poor care into evidence she cannot be taken at her written word about care.
Her reflective pieces and partial admissions give the review something to build on, and the panel’s nine-month term implies remediability. What the register now records, though, is a nurse suspended for the gap between what she wrote about a child’s night and what occurred during it .