A London nurse who tracked down a woman he had seen on a hospital stretcher and asked her on a date has been struck off, after a tribunal found he also kissed a senior colleague without consent and then gave an account of that incident it concluded was untrue
By Gift Mawire
A mental health nurse who used a chance encounter in a hospital emergency department to pursue a young woman on social media has been removed from the nursing register, after a disciplinary panel found his conduct towards her was sexually motivated and that he had separately kissed a colleague on the lips against her will.
Romulus Berejena, who qualified as a registered mental health nurse in February 2016 and worked in Greater London, was struck off by a Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) fitness to practise panel following a week-long virtual hearing that concluded on 25 August.
The panel said the combination of sexual misconduct, the abuse of a nurse’s position of trust and concerns about his honesty during the proceedings made his continued registration “fundamentally incompatible” with the standards expected of the profession.
A patient in a neck brace
The case began with a complaint from a woman, referred to in the proceedings as Patient A, who had been brought to the emergency department on 22 May 2024 after a car accident.
While she lay on a stretcher in a corridor, wearing a neck brace and awaiting assessment, Mr Berejena saw her. He was not involved in her care. According to his own account to his employer, a friend of the patient told him she was single, and he remarked that he was at work but “might add her on Instagram”. The panel heard that the patient had asked those around her to stop discussing her.
After she was discharged, Mr Berejena found her on Instagram. In messages seen by the panel, he said he remembered her from the hospital, told her he “wouldn’t have followed if I didn’t find ya attractive” and asked her to go on a date.
He then sent two voice notes. In one, he said: “I’m probably going to be driving because we know what you’re on, in it.” In the other: “You know what you’re on, so we don’t need to get into it babe.”
The woman blocked him and, on 29 May, complained to the hospital’s Patient Advice and Liaison Service. Mr Berejena was suspended by his employer two days later. A trust disciplinary hearing in August 2024 gave him an 18-month written warning, and the trust referred him to the NMC.
At the NMC hearing, Mr Berejena admitted sending the messages but denied any sexual motive. He told the panel he thought the woman was “fun” and that he had hoped to create Instagram content with her. The panel rejected that explanation, noting that content creation was never mentioned in the messages. It pointed instead to his words at his internal disciplinary interview, when he said he had wanted to get to know her “because she was an attractive girl”.
The panel found that the patient’s circumstances placed her in “a position of heightened vulnerability”, and that the fact he had not personally treated her did not release him from his professional obligations. Fellow practitioners and the public, it said, would regard his conduct as “deplorable”.
“Assaulted by a colleague”
During the NMC investigation, a second matter came to light. A senior sister at the same trust, referred to as Colleague B and granted anonymity by the panel, had reported that on 19 July 2022 Mr Berejena had kissed her in the hospital’s Mental Health Assessment Unit.
She had come to the unit at his request to help manage a distressed patient. In her evidence, she said he told her: “I saw you downstairs without your mask. You look very pretty.” He then placed both hands on her cheeks, pulled her face towards his and kissed her on the lips.
“I felt appalled that he had done that to me. I felt offended and disgusted,” she said in her witness statement. She told the panel she had felt “violated”, adding that while staff in the unit might expect to be assaulted by a patient, they would not expect it from a colleague.
She reported the incident to a matron eight days later. When told Mr Berejena denied it, she chose not to pursue a formal complaint, fearing it would become a case of “he said, she said”. Instead, she began avoiding the unit when he was on duty, phoning through for handovers rather than going in person.
Mr Berejena admitted making the comment but denied the kiss, offering what the panel described as a “highly elaborate” account of the physical layout of the area and the position of a blue tray to explain why it could not have happened. The panel preferred Colleague B’s evidence, which it found consistent and credible, and found the kiss proved, along with findings that it was unwanted, sexual in nature and had the effect of violating her dignity.
It did not find that he had intended to violate her dignity, accepting that the kiss may have been “an impulsive, ill-judged or misguided act”.
Late insight
After the panel’s findings, Mr Berejena gave further evidence under oath in which he accepted that his approach to Patient A had been sexually motivated and described it as a “predatory boundary” breach. He apologised for the distress he had caused both women, acknowledged that he had exploited a position of trust, and set out a personal plan to separate his professional life from social media, escalate any boundary concerns to a supervisor and undertake weekly structured reflection.
Asking for a suspension rather than removal, he told the panel he loved his career and wanted the chance to complete training on sexual harassment and professional boundaries.
The panel recognised his insight was “emerging and developing” and accepted that the misconduct was not the product of an entrenched attitudinal problem. But it found that much of that development had come only during the hearing itself, roughly two years after the events, and that there was no evidence he had apologised to either woman beforehand.
Crucially, it drew a distinction between his right to deny the allegation and the way he had done so. By persisting until the findings were made in an account it had found to be untrue, the panel said, he had “effectively alleged that Colleague B was lying” — a matter it said raised “significant concerns regarding your integrity, personal accountability and professional judgement”.
“A patient attending hospital is entitled to trust that a healthcare professional will not use an encounter arising through healthcare as an opportunity to pursue a personal or sexual relationship,” the panel said. “Equally, a healthcare professional is entitled to attend work without being subjected to unwanted sexualised behaviour from a colleague.”
The panel concluded that nothing short of striking him off would protect the public, maintain confidence in nursing and uphold professional standards.
Mr Berejena, who represented himself, has 28 days from receiving the written decision to lodge an appeal. He told the panel he would read the decision before deciding whether to do so. An 18-month interim suspension order was imposed to cover any appeal period.
The case is the latest in a series of NMC proceedings in which regulators have stressed that sexual misconduct towards colleagues, not only patients, can put patient safety at risk by making clinical workplaces feel unsafe for the staff who work in them.
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