Nurses blamed for killer's escape
Updated on 26 June 2009
Two agency nurses have been blamed for allowing Terrence O'Keefe to escape from an accident and emergency unit after he faked chest pains.
Senior staff at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust said the temporary staff members did not understand the risk he posed.
Consultant forensic psychiatrist Professor Tom Fahy said the two nurses simply let him "out of their sight" allowing him to walk out of the door.
The mistake left the robber and rapist on the run for nine weeks, during which time he murdered pensioner David Kemp and robbed a fellow drug addict.
Prof Fahy said O'Keefe exploited a "chink in the armour" of the hospital's security arrangements which no longer exists.
He said: "Since then we have tightened up our security arrangements so that patients under these circumstances can be accompanied by a larger number of staff, up to four in high risk cases.
"We may also employ security staff to supervise an individual and if they needed handcuffs they would be able to apply those."
O'Keefe was able to walk out of King's College Hospital, in south London, unchallenged after faking a medical emergency in February 2008.
Astonishingly, O'Keefe had also escaped from King's College Hospital in October 2005, but was recaptured the same day in Liverpool, his childhood home.
Prof Fahy said: "The staff who supervised him were also temporary staff, they were agency nurses not full-time members of the unit. Their appreciation of the risk may not have been full.This instance of supervision was not appropriate and exposed a chink in our armour."
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