A Buckinghamshire nurse of 21 years has been sanctioned by a regulator after not telling her employer she was unregistered.

Theresa Musavengana was handed a one-year caution order by the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) after a Fitness to Practise Committee hearing last week.

The order will appear with her name will on the NMC register and anyone who asks about her registration will be informed of the order.

Mrs Musavengana, who has been a nurse since 2002, admitted that she worked as a nurse without NMC registration on one or more occasion between September 1, 2021 and November 10, 2021, but denied she had been “dishonest”.

During this period, she worked for the Fremantle Trust which provides care for elderly people and adults with learning disabilities and took on some shifts at Westgate Healthcare Group.

The nurse realised her NMC registration had lapsed around October 19, 2021, and completed and submitted the forms for readmission the same day.

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The Trust terminated her contract several weeks later after it transpired that she had been working there without a valid NMC PIN number.

A charge that Mrs Musavengana was “dishonest” in that she “attempted to mislead her employer” was not proved.

However, the panel found that her actions fell “seriously short of the conduct and standards expected of a nurse and amounted to misconduct”.

It added that the misconduct “breached fundamental tenets of the nursing profession in that you acted dishonestly, and therefore brought its reputation into disrepute”.

Despite this, witnesses said Mrs Musavengana was a “good nurse” and that the incident “was out of character”.

A representative for the nurse said this demonstrated that she was a “good, trustworthy and honest nurse, who is experienced and caring”.

They added that she did not work unregistered out of “personal gain” but did so during the Covid-19 pandemic when nursing support was “vital in the care home sector”.