27 Mar 2024
A VN has been granted anonymity by a disciplinary panel despite her admission that she implied she was a vet and made a series of offensive remarks towards minority groups.
Vet Times
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Image © Andrey Popov / Adobe Stock
A veterinary nurse who falsely implied she was a vet and made discriminatory remarks on social media has been struck off the RCVS register.
The nurse, known only as Mrs D following a successful application for anonymity, admitted disgraceful conduct in a professional capacity during a two-day hearing last week.
Newly published papers from the hearing said removal from the register was the only appropriate sanction to maintain public confidence in the profession.
The report said: “For a registered veterinary nurse to pretend to be a veterinary surgeon on a public platform is itself an extremely serious matter.
“When that presentation is associated with the highly offensive language of the tweets in this case, extending over a period of years, the conduct is in the view of the committee fundamentally incompatible with continued registration.”
The case relates to around 40 separate posts written by Mrs D on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter, between 2018-23.
While she implied she was a vet in some, the report said 28 of the tweets, posted between June 2020 and last year, were offensive and discriminatory towards minority groups.
Terms such as “grimmigrants” and “feral” were among the derogatory comments posted.
The committee said the case was aggravated by dishonesty in the implication that Mrs D was a vet and associated questions about her honesty, plus the “highly offensive” nature of many of the posts.
In written submissions to the panel, Mrs D, who admitted three charges against her at the outset of the hearing, said she had experienced a number of personal difficulties and had become “isolated and bitter” during the period in which the tweets were posted.
She insisted she was not seeking to suggest those issues excused her actions.
But she argued that anonymity should be granted because of health and family circumstances.
The report said the college’s legal representatives adopted a neutral stance to the application and much of the reasoning for the committee’s decision to grant it has been redacted in the published reports.
However, Mrs D’s husband told the committee that enabling her to be identified could be “catastrophic for the whole family”.
