Tomorrow will mark one year since Stephen Hawking passed away.

There were touching video tributes and quote collections in the days that followed, and now there have been recriminations for one of his former nurses.

According to the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), 61-year-old Patricia Dowdy has been struck off after they ruled that she had “failed to provide the standards of good, professional care that we expect and Professor Hawking deserved”

Here’s more from the Guardian:

Dowdy, from Ipswich, Suffolk, worked for the scientist for eight years and had been handed an interim suspension in 2016 over the misconduct allegations.

Matthew McClelland, the director of fitness to practise at the NMC, said Dowdy would not be allowed to practise as a nurse.

“As the public rightly expects, in serious cases such as this – where a nurse has failed in their duty of care and has not been able to evidence to the panel that they have learned from their mistakes and be fit to practise – we will take action,” he said.

“We have remained in close contact with the Hawking family throughout this case and I am grateful to them – as they approach the anniversary of Professor Hawking’s death – and others for sharing their concerns with us. My thoughts are with the family at this difficult time.

The Hawking family released a statement thanking the NMC for their “thorough investigation”, with the ruling handed down after a six-week hearing in London.

That hearing was conducted behind closed doors, and we will probably never know exactly what Dowdy did or didn’t do:

Andrea Sutcliffe, the NMC’s chief executive, said hearings were sometimes held in private to keep information confidential.

“That is the basis upon which this particular hearing was conducted in private, and I stand by that decision,” she wrote in a blogpost on Monday. “No public interest is served by exposing the details of the health or care of an individual whose anonymity may not be guaranteed in an open hearing.”

At least she won’t be providing inferior care to anybody else any time soon.

Given that Hawking stated there is no God, we won’t pretend that he’s watching on from somewhere.

[source:guardian]