Phylicia Khadijatu Sheriff
Introduction
Phylicia Khadijatu Sheriff is a registered nurse who was suspended for four months by the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) on 30 July 2026, after a Fitness to Practise Committee panel found that she slapped a colleague on the cheek during a handover in a hospital critical care unit. Sheriff admitted the charge. The panel found the slap was deliberate but impulsive and out of character, decided that her insight needed further development, and imposed the suspension together with an 18-month interim suspension order covering the appeal period .
Background Information
At the time of the incident Sheriff was employed as a Band 6 registered nurse by North Middlesex University Hospital NHS Trust, a senior nursing grade carrying supervisory responsibilities. The trust referred her to the NMC on 21 June 2024, a few weeks after the events that led to the hearing .
The incident itself happened on 29 May 2024. The NMC’s case was that during a handover in the trust’s Critical Care Unit, a colleague coughed near Sheriff, was asked not to do so again, coughed a second time, and was then slapped on the face. Two colleagues witnessed what happened — the evidence base on which the panel later preferred the NMC’s account .
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. Sheriff admitted the charge.
The charge was that Sheriff, a registered nurse, on 29 May 2024 “slapped colleague A on the cheek”, and that in light of this her fitness to practise was impaired by reason of her misconduct. She admitted it, and the panel found the charge proved. It then heard live evidence from three NMC witnesses and from Sheriff herself in order to resolve the disputed context of what had happened .
The panel’s factual findings were specific. It found she had slapped her colleague “with the palm of her hand with sufficient force to cause pain, leaving a mark”, and that the contact was “deliberate rather than accidental, though impulsive rather than premeditated or planned”. Where Sheriff’s account of the context conflicted with the witnesses’, the panel preferred the accounts of the two independent witnesses, and it found that Sheriff “had sought to minimise her wrongdoing” .
On standards, the panel found breaches of Code paragraphs 1.1, 1.2, 20.1, 20.3, 20.5 and 20.8 — the provisions covering kindness, respect and working collaboratively with colleagues — and concluded the conduct amounted to misconduct. On impairment it found limbs (a) to (c) of the Grant test engaged, found no deep-seated attitudinal concerns, but held that insight required further development and that a risk of repetition remained. Impairment was found on both public protection and public interest grounds .
Public Reaction and Consequences
The consequence within the trust came first: the referral to the regulator three weeks after the incident, and the end of the matter being an internal workplace disagreement. From the regulator came the four-month suspension order and the 18-month interim suspension that covers any appeal — a suspension that removes her from the register while it lasts.
The panel’s sanction reasoning cut both ways. In mitigation it credited the early admission of the charge, an apology to the colleague affected, evidence that she had worked safely and professionally in the same role since the events, relevant training courses, reflective accounts, and an otherwise unblemished 24-year career. Against that it set the limited insight, the failure to work collaboratively with a colleague, the physical and emotional harm caused, and the minimisation of the conduct’s seriousness .
Further personal mitigation was heard in private under the rules and is not part of the public record. No wider public controversy attaches to the case in the fetched record; the visible consequences are the regulatory ones .
Current Status
Sheriff is a suspended nurse. The four-month suspension was imposed on 30 July 2026 at the end of a hearing that ran from 23 July, with an 18-month interim suspension order in place to cover the appeal period. The panel considered her misconduct potentially remediable: it found no deep-seated attitudinal concerns, but said her insight needed further development and that a risk of repetition remained. Whether she returns to unrestricted practice depends on the review that follows the suspension and on any appeal .
Impact on Their Career/Life
A Band 6 nurse with 24 years of unblemished service now has a misconduct finding for a physical assault on a colleague on her record, and a period on the suspension list. The panel’s own framing — impulsive, out of character, capable of remediation — is the reason the outcome was suspension rather than erasure, but the minimisation it identified is also the reason insight was judged incomplete.
The practical effects are straightforward: she cannot practise as a nurse while the suspension runs, her employer’s referral is now a permanent part of her regulatory history, and any future application or review will be assessed against a panel finding that she used the palm of her hand, with sufficient force to leave a mark, on a colleague who had coughed twice .