Complaint about Launceston General Hospital HR was referred back to HR

A complaint about Launceston General Hospital’s HR should not have been referred back to HR for investigation, the Tasmanian Ombudsman says.

Tasmanian Ombudsman Richard Connock says a complaint about claims of a cover-up at Launceston General Hospital should not have been referred back to the hospital’s HR for investigation.

In November 2019, Tasmania’s Integrity Commission received a complaint raising concerns about alleged mishandling of staff complaints in the Jim Griffin scandal by the hospital’s HR department, and that documents and evidence had been destroyed.

Last week, the Integrity Commission’s Michael Easton said he’d recommended the November 2019 complaint be referred back to the Department of Health.

The complaint then ended up at the hospital’s HR department.

On Monday, Richard Connock, who is also the state’s Health Complaints Commissioner, was asked whether the Integrity Commission should have referred the complaint back to the Department of Health “as the most appropriate body”.

Counsel assisting the commission Maree Norton asked if doing so was a conflict of interest.

“Bearing in mind that part of that complaint concerned mishandling of staff complaints by the HR department, do you have any observations about the propriety or otherwise of HR being responsible for responding to the complaint?” she asked.

“It probably should have gone somewhere other than human resources in this instance, yes,” Mr Connock replied.

Last week, the commission heard the hospital’s HR department had received a number of alerts about paedophile nurse James Geoffrey Griffin over several years, but failed to intervene.

Inquiry hears how paedophile groomed teen like she “owed” him

Jim Griffin would often remind Kirsty Neilley he’d saved her life when she had a seizure in hospital.

She has no memory of the event or her time in Launceston General Hospital’s intensive care unit, so she doesn’t even know if the now-notorious abuser was telling her the truth.

But Griffin never let her forget, grooming her as a teenager to feel like she “owed” him and that he was her hero.

The young mother, giving evidence at Tasmania’s child sexual abuse commission of inquiry on Monday, said she was 16 years old when she was first admitted to the hospital’s paediatric 4K ward in October 2015.

Griffin struck up a “friendship” with Ms Neilley, spending lots of time with her and scrolling through Facebook together.

“He told me not to tell anyone,” she told the commission.

Griffin soon told her someone had reported him “for getting too close to me”, giving her his phone number so a random number would pop up on her screen when he messaged, rather than his Facebook profile.

“I kind of enjoyed having him to talk to, so I didn’t even think of it that way,” she said.

“He told me not to tell anyone because he could lose his job over it, but he didn’t want me to be by myself. I’d been really uncomfortable to talk to anyone else, including my parents, so he was really my main support.”

Ms Neilley never heard anything more about the complaint, and no-one from the hospital ever spoke to her.

Meanwhile, Griffin’s behaviour started to escalate.

He’d give her long hugs at the end of his shifts, but again, Ms Neilley didn’t realise it meant anything more sinister than concern “like a family friend”.

Then she started waking up at night, with Griffin leaning over her bed with his mobile phone.

The next time Ms Neilley went to hospital, she suffered complications and had a seizure, spending time in intensive care.

“I wasn’t told about what happened at all. The only people that told me were mum and Jim. None of the other nurses told me at all,” Ms Neilley said.

“He said he’d come and visited me a few times when I was in there, and then later on he told me that … he pulled me out from under the bed and he saved my life when I had the seizure.”

Ms Neilley returned to hospital the following year, when she was 17, after tearing a muscle in her leg from a horse riding accident.

Because she was unable to walk, Griffin took her down the hallway in a wheelchair so she could take a shower.

But when Ms Neilley finished in the shower, she couldn’t find her clothes.

She called out for Griffin, who said there were no wheelchairs available.

Instead, he carried her semi-naked down the hall to her bed - where she found her clothes waiting.

Serial child sexual abuser James Geoffrey Griffin worked at Launceston General Hospital for 18 years.

Ms Neilley said Griffin was more like “a second father, a family figure” than just her nurse - attending her wedding and calling her “baby girl”.

One day, she ran into him in the supermarket, where Griffin again reminded her he’d saved her life.

“He mentioned that he still had all the photos and memories of us,” she said.

“I assumed it was our wedding photos that I had.”

Now, Ms Neilley is fearful about what photos Griffin was actually referring to, and if he’d had pictures of her from her time in hospital.

“I was really upset about it at the time, but … there’s no way I can find out,” she said.

“There were a lot of red flags that people could have picked up on. I just feel like I was really let down that nothing actually happened.”

The commission previously heard Tasmania Police was notified as early as 2000 that Griffin had child abuse material and links to exploitation websites on his computer.

In 2009, police searched his home after receiving a complaint he’d been taking photos up the skirts of young girls aboard the Spirit of Tasmania. Upon searching his home, police found a large number of photos of young girls.

Griffin was not charged or stood down from his role until 2019.

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