A pharmacy worker who faked a Covid vaccine certificate for her boyfriend has avoided being struck off.
Holly De Souza used a junior colleague’s login details to falsify the records so her long-term partner and his brother could travel abroad.
But she initially lied about what had happened before eventually coming clean and claiming she had been ‘coerced’.
A technician at the Wicker Pharmacy in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, faced a professional tribunal for engaging in deceptive and premeditated actions in early March 2022, shortly after leaving the pharmacy.
Ms De Souza contacted a junior colleague – referred to only as Colleague A – requesting login details to access the Covid vaccination register.
The technician utilized the acquired information to manipulate records, initially telling a colleague that she needed the details to ‘check the queue’ for her visiting cousins interested in receiving the Covid booster from Southampton.
It is alleged she then asked for Colleague A’s details, claiming she could not remember her own.
The next day, she informed her former colleague that her cousins might not be visiting after all, implying she might not require the booster, and later requested her security word.
A professional tribunal heard the technician, based at the Wicker Pharmacy in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, carried out the ‘dishonest’ and ‘calculated’ actions in early March 2022
Ms De Souza admitted to accessing the pharmacy system to create Covid-19 vaccination records for her boyfriend and his brother
After Ms De Souza accessed the system, Colleague A contacted her and asked if she had vaccinated anyone that afternoon.
The Pharmacy Technician denied this and said she was ‘not sure’ why the system suggested otherwise and told her former co-worker to ‘just cancel it’.
The issue was further looked into and another staff member phoned Ms De Souza to ask what happened at which point she responded she ‘had received a referral back from a surgery’.
He asked her to forward the email in but did not hear back.
Later that month, Ms De Souza sent an email back to the Wicker Pharmacy in which she explained she had ‘misrepresented herself’.
She then went on to explain how the two individual records involved were for her boyfriend and his brother.
‘They were coming to visit my nan who is very sick…but I didn’t believe they were vaccinated.
‘I accessed the system with another colleague’s login to check this and mistakenly put this through,’ she claimed.
But her colleague said he did not ‘understand’ her explanation and said she had inputted a series of details which appeared ‘incompatible with an error’.
He saw the information completed by her included the vaccine and asserted that Ms De Souza had ‘deliberately created a false record’.
Later that month, Ms De Souza admitted to accessing the pharmacy system to create Covid-19 vaccination records for her boyfriend and his brother.
It was heard she did this because they ‘did not want to be vaccinated’ but ‘required proof of vaccination’.
She told the panel that she had ‘not appreciated’ the ‘impact’ of her actions at the time – which she described as serious misconduct.
And she shared details of her relationship with her then-boyfriend of seven years to the panel.
The pharmacy technician said the ‘nature’ of their partnership ‘changed over the course of time’ and that he would ask her about her role during the Covid-19 vaccination programme and had started ‘demanding’ her to change his records.
‘Her boyfriend had started asking her to create a false vaccination record for him claiming that he needed it to visit family overseas,’ the panel said.
Ms De Souza also told the panel it was ‘general knowledge’ that during the covid vaccination programme some health care professionals were accepting money to alter vaccination records and revealed she had been offered ‘significant sums of money’.
The GPC Committee was of the view that the incident was ‘serious’ and that Ms De Souza had admitted to ‘calculated, sustained and deliberate dishonesty’.
‘She lied more than once and she took deliberate steps to falsify records, and she knowingly manipulated a junior colleague to assist her,’ they said.
They added the ‘lack of integrity’ and ‘dishonesty’ breach the ‘fundamental tenets of the profession’ and ‘strike at the heart of professional standards’.
The panel also referred to Ms De Souza’s evidence, and said she appears to have ‘matured’ since but described her actions as ‘selfish’ and ‘disgusting’.
She alleged she had been ‘coerced’ by her former boyfriend to be dishonest which the Committee described as being a ‘very difficult situation’ for her.
The GPC suspended Ms De Souza for a year with several conditions in place for when she resumes employment.
