industry & reform
Into the light
Podcast sheds light on alleged sexual abuse and mismanagement in Tasmania ’ s health system .
Camille Bianchi interviewed by Conor Burke
James Griffin was a paediatric
nurse in Tasmania . A family man , he was well liked , a bit un-PC for some , but a model citizen in most people ’ s opinion .
But Jim was allegedly hiding a dark and horrific secret that when revealed would shake the Tasmanian health system and other institutions to their core .
This story is the subject of the new podcast ‘ The Nurse ’, by Camille Bianchi who spoke to Nursing Review to tell the tale .
10 | nursingreview . com . au
NR : Tell us a bit about Jim . CB : I got hundreds of accounts of Jim from all different stages of his life . And they were really varied . The headline is that he was charged for offences related to sexual abuse of children and creating child exploitation material .
But if we go behind that person and who we now know him to be , he was very different in terms of the Jim he presented to people . And if we ’ re talking about the Jim that people met on Ward 4K at Launceston General Hospital , he was a star nurse . I ’ ve had some of the most stark conversations in investigating this podcast with former patients . And no fewer than three of them have said to me he ’ s the reason they decided to eventually study nursing .
Did he use his position as a nurse to groom people ? Not only did he groom the kids in his care , he was a paediatric nurse on a paediatric ward for 20 years in Launceston . He groomed their families . And what I know about that area , having lived there and worked there , is there are a lot of lower socioeconomic groups . There ’ s really stark disparity in wealth distribution across Tasmania , so you ’ ll hear a lot about unemployment statistics , and that is really relevant here , because some of those vulnerable and marginalised communities have families where there aren ’ t two parents in the picture .
Typically , there are really honourable , active , engaged parents that are going to call someone like that to account , if they ’ re noticing that someone ’ s behaving really strangely with their child . Some of the worst stories I heard were former patients who grew up and they look back in hindsight and they say : “ Look , I didn ’ t have the best home life . No one was really looking out for me in the way that you normally would expect someone would look out for their kid , and that ’ s why I fell into the path of this abuser .”
I was surprised that a lot of his behaviour seemed to be really out in the open . Tell us a bit about his trip to Gallipoli . Jim ’ s trip to Gallipoli was with a girl who ended up becoming the first person to lay charges against him . But many years before that he would be seen in the company of a then 11-year-old up until she was about 17 on the hospital ward . She would come in , he would be in the company of her , in the netball team . There were a lot of questions raised , I now know about .