Filipino psychopath with forged qualifications poisoned 22 patients in the UK

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Pressure was growing last night for an inquiry into vetting failures that allowed a nurse to kill two patients and poison scores more in an NHS hospital.

Victorino Chua, a 49-year-old father of two, attacked the very people he was supposed to be caring for. At the height of his poisoning spree, police even considered shutting down Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport.

Police believe the ‘narcissistic psychopath’ from the Philippines used forged qualifications to register as a nurse here. They even suspect that someone might have sat his nursing exam for him in his homeland.

Ahead of Chua’s sentencing today there were calls for a public inquiry and a review of how foreign nurses are recruited.
It can also be revealed that:

Chua graduated from a nursing college now shut down amid concerns about its poor standards and finances;

Lax vetting – including acceptance of photocopied documents – allowed him to register as a nurse in the UK;

No checks were made with his employers at the Philippines hospital which he left after being accused of theft;

Detectives fear Chua may have claimed the lives of other patients both here and in the Philippines;

The trade in fake nursing qualifications that can be bought for as little as £43;


Occupational therapists at Stepping Hill Hospital failed to raise concerns about Chua’s deteriorating mental state in the run-up to the poisonings;

Victims of the poisonings are in line for millions of pounds in compensation payments from Chua’s NHS hospital trust;

Chua, who became a British citizen in 2008, could use human rights laws to avoid deportation.

Last night, the recently retired prosecutor who helped bring Chua to justice said he believes there could be hundreds of nurses using fake qualifications in UK hospitals.

For Victorino ‘Vic’ Chua a nursing career in England was a ticket out of poverty. He had been earning just £3 a day as a nurse when he answered a newspaper advert to work in a UK care home.

Chua set his sights on working in Britain after learning of Tony Blair’s plan – announced in 2000 – to recruit thousands of overseas nurses.

But it now seems clear that he should never have been working for the NHS. An original transcript of his nursing qualifications suggest that his exam marks may have been tampered with.

Demands for an inquiry into foreign nurse recruitment intensified last night in the aftermath of the Chua scandal.

Hospitals have spent £1million in three years hiring nurses from 16 countries including the Philippines, Portugal, Romania, Lithuania, Greece, Poland, Sweden, Italy, India, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

The NHS is now so dependent on foreign nurses that half of hospital trusts have staged recruitment drives overseas since 2012 and there are 23,000 Filipino nurses on the UK register.

Freedom of Information responses also reveal that managers are so desperate to fill vacancies that they are failing to test the nurses’ English properly. Instead, they rely on the judgement of recruitment agencies. The former chief prosecutor in the North West, Nazir Afzal, told BBC North West that during the Chua investigation his team wrote to Home Office and Health Department officials and nursing regulators raising their concerns about potentially fraudulent qualifications. He said: ‘The concerns related to the robustness... of the qualification and training regime that they had in the Philippines at that time.’

Katherine Murphy of the Patients Association said: ‘If we do employ nurses from other countries, we must ensure that they are fully qualified and competent to carry out their duties and that they are competent enough in English to effectively communicate.’
One of Chua’s victims, Kath Murray, 57, backed calls for an inquiry into foreign recruitment.

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