Dietician who blagged a senior NHS role didn’t even know where intestines were

A dietician who inflated her qualifications to blag a senior NHS job has been kicked out of the health profession after it emerged she lacked knowledge of even ‘basic anatomy’.

Ifenyinwa Chizube Ndulue-Nonso, who moved to the UK from Nigeria, claimed to have experience working with various health problems and nutrition-related diseases, as well as patients with eating disorders and cancer.

But within days of starting work as a dietician at Manchester Royal Infirmary in 2024, colleagues found she struggled to calculate BMI and had only a ‘basic understanding of human anatomy’.

She could not identify a feeding tube, mixed up the small and large intestines, and believed heart failure was treated with radiology.

Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust launched an investigation and Ndulue-Nonso was suspended amid concerns over her safety to practice.

She was later found guilty of gross misconduct and dismissed, a decision upheld on appeal, the Daily Mail reports.

The panel heard Ndulue-Nonso was the only applicant for the Band 6 Rotational Dietician role and scored an acceptable 28 out of 45 for having suitable skills and knowledge.

Within days of starting, both her line manager and a senior colleague noticed worrying gaps in her knowledge.

In her first week, Ndulue-Nonso mixed up the small and large intestines. She failed to correctly calculate a BMI the same day.

The senior colleague determined she was barely qualified for a Band 5 position, let alone Band 6.

When Ndulue-Nonso could not identify the feeding tube placed in a patient’s nose, mistaking it for a breathing tube, she wrote: ‘She then told me that the feeding tubes are different in Nigeria.’

Her line manager told the panel she could not tell the difference between Coeliac disease and IBS, had no experience of patients with burns and Googled dietetic terms that he expected her to know.

Under cross-examination, the panel found she had little or no knowledge or experience in most of the areas she claimed to have in her application.

Ndulue-Nonso admitted having no experience at all in several critical fields, including parenteral nutrition, artificial feeding and working with pharmacists or medical lab scientists.

The Health and Care Professions Tribunal Service (HCPTS) panel found she deliberately lied on her application form and during her interview and was not qualified for her role.

They found she put patients at risk by deliberately misrepresenting her knowledge and experience to ‘benefit her personally’.

The panel said Ndulue-Nonso had ‘much to gain personally from securing employment in the UK, including the right to reside here with her family’.

The only reason no one was harmed, they added, was because of the precautions taken by her supervisors, who did not allow her to be patient-facing.

A spokesperson from Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust said: ‘We are pleased to see the hearing has concluded after we reported Mrs Ndulue-Nonso to the relevant professional body, in this case the Health & Care Professions Council.

‘Whilst Mrs Ndulue-Nonso was a registered practitioner at the point of employment, concerns were raised by staff within a few days that she may have misrepresented her qualifications.

‘We ensured she was always supervised in the workplace as we conducted a rapid fact-finding exercise, following which swift action was taken and she was removed from her post. No patients were harmed or their care impacted.

‘We have since reviewed our recruitment processes and strengthened our operations. Anyone that falsifies information in the recruitment process will be reported to the Health & Care Professions Council.’

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