Three care workers are to face trial accused of taking a patient from a nursing home to a strip night and allowing a naked male adult entertainer to sit on her knee.
The incident is said to have occurred at an adult entertainment show at Baxter’s Function Suite in Dundee, after carers Caitlin Gibb, Shannon Briggs, and Samantha Brunton took two residents there from the Linlathen Neurological Care Centre on Arbroath Road, Dundee.
The centre, the closure of which was announced last year, was home to 33 people with long-term brain injuries or complex neurological conditions and was Scotland’s only unit dedicated to the inherited degenerative brain condition Huntington’s disease.
Gibb and Briggs, both 20, and Brunton, 34, are accused of “ill treating or wilfully neglecting” the two residents in their care by their actions in the run-up to Christmas 2018.
Each denies a single charge alleging that they attended at the Linlathen Centre while under the influence of alcohol and conveyed two female residents to an adult entertainment show at Baxter’s Function Suite, Raglan Street, Dundee; allowed them to consume alcohol at the public licensed premises there without supervision; consumed alcohol themselves and failed to properly care for the women; and permitted a naked male adult entertainer to sit on the knee of one of the women while she was in a wheelchair there.
At Dundee Sheriff Court yesterday, the trio, all of Dundee, pled not guilty to the charge through their solicitors and the case was continued to a procedural hearing in May. None of the accused were present in court.
Solicitor Kevin Hampton, for Gibb and Brunton, said they both took exception to the statement in the charge that the two residents were in their care at the time of the alleged incident.
Mr Hampton said: “Both accept attending the event and taking the residents there, however their position is it was in a voluntary capacity and they were not being paid to take them.”
He added that it was also their position that no alcohol was consumed by either the accused or the complainers.
Solicitor David Duncan said Briggs’ position was the same.
Sheriff Alastair Carmichael set trial for June 5, with a preliminary hearing on May 13.
In an announcement last October the Linlathen Centre’s owners, Living Ambitions, said they were closing it and moving residents to a new home because its “setting and environment were not compatible with providing high quality care”.
Since it was acquired by Living Ambitions in 2017, Linlathen had been the subject of two reports by the Care Inspectorate, which first described standards as “weak” and later “adequate”.
