AN EXPERIENCED nurse gave a cancer patient the wrong drugs at a Merseyside hospital.

Helen Chidlow , 43, lost her job as a cancer nurse last year at Wirral’s Clatterbridge Centre, after she injected a chemotherapy drug into a patient, which had been labelled for another patient.

She yesterday lost her case for unfair dismissal at a Liverpool tribunal.

The NHS Trust found she had committed gross misconduct by knowingly giving a patient somebody else's drug.

But, at the hearing, Ms Chidlow, from Chester, who has helped cancer patients for more than 20 years, said she took the decision, “in the patient’s best interests”, and added nurses often had to use their own discretion in certain situations.

On June 2 last year, the nurse said she gave “Patient 1” a correctly labelled syringe of a chemotherapy drug.

But when another nurse came to treat “patient 2”, only a drug labelled with the name of “patient 1” remained.

Both patients were prescribed the same drug and dosage, so Ms Chidlow gave “Patient 2” the remaining medicine, despite the labelling error.

At a disciplinary hearing in August, the Trust decided to dismiss Ms Chidlow because of her knowingly using the wrong drug, and failing to realise the importance of her mistake.

Darren Hurrell, chief executive of the Trust, told the tribunal: “We have a policy and procedure in place to protect patients’ safety, and Mrs Chidlow decided these weren’t as important as her own discretion.

“We can’t have somebody overriding a policy which, at the end of the day, could kill somebody.”