Nurse used client details to prescribe others Ozempic, court told

An aesthetics nurse from County Down gave prescriptions to clients using the details of other clients, a court has heard.

Nichola Hawes, 49, is on trial for alleged fraud and selling or supplying medicines, including weight-loss drugs and botox, without proper prescriptions.

Downpatrick Crown Court heard evidence from four women who said prescriptions were filled using their details but they had not asked for, nor received medicines.

Ms Hawes runs Nichola Hawes Aesthetic Clinic on the Groomsport Road in Bangor, and has 31 charges against her, including selling or supplying prescription drugs, possessing medicinal products with intent to supply and fraud by false representation.

Lauren Caproni told the jury she had filled in an online questionnaire for the self-administering weight-loss drug Ozempic and it had been approved.

Ms Caproni said the cost of was between £190-250 per pen.

She said she cancelled a face-to-face consultation at Nichola Hawes clinic that had been scheduled for 6 April 2022.

Ms Caproni said a prescription had been filled out in her name on 16 March 2022, three weeks before the proposed consultation.

The jury was told the online questionnaire by the clinic states medicines will not not be prescribed until after an in-person consultation.

Ms Caproni was asked by the prosecution if she had asked “for a prescription or completed a consultation with the defendant to request that prescription?”.

Lauren Caproni said she had not.

The court then heard that a box of Ozempic pens, with the name Lauren Caproni scored out, was given to another client a few weeks later.

The jury heard that Ms Hawes’ clinic “provides advance skin treatment, aesthetics treatments, anti-wrinkle injections, lip fillers and fat dissolving injections”.

A Medicines Regulatory Group investigation began in November 2022 when they were alerted to a “potential breach” of regulations.

The breach related to a box containing vials of B12, Hyaluronidase and Ozempic pens that were being delivered to Jordan Cairns, whose mother, Janice Cairns, had obtained three pens from Hawes’ clinic several months earlier.

Janice Cairns told the jury that after she and her daughter had their consultation in April 2022, they were given a box with three Ozempic injections inside but that she noticed “straight away…there was someone else’s name” on the box but it had been “scribbled out with black pen”.

Janice Cairns said she received two more Ozempic pens in October 2022 but had not asked for nor received any further treatments of medicines from the clinic.

The jury was told there had been a prescription of three boxes of Rybelsus, a weight-loss tablet, with Janice Cairns details filled in and signed by Ms Hawes.

Ms Cairns told the court she had not asked for that nor had she ever received any of the tablets.

Louise Abbott told the court she had been a client at the clinic between December 2021 and some time in October 2022.

She confirmed that in March and April 2022 she ordered and paid £500 for two weight-loss pens but when she received the box it was not in her name.

The jury also heard that in September 2022 there was a prescription for another weight-loss pen, signed by Ms Hawes with Ms Abbott’s details, but she told the court she did not ask nor receive that prescription.

A fourth women, Lorraine Rogan, told the jury she had been a client of Ms Hawes since 2019, initially receiving B12 injections that she ordered and also ordered two Ozempic pens in 2021 and another pen in May 2022.

The prosecution told the jury that other prescriptions for Ozempic pens as well as Botox had been ordered in her name without her request or knowledge.

The defence put to Ms Rogan that she had received the other prescriptions of Ozempic pens but Ms Rogan said she only received “three pens”.

It is the crown case that Ms Hawes, a prescribing nurse, supplied different types of prescription only medicines including weight loss drugs, facial fillers and drugs used for local anaesthesia.

The fraud offences accuse Hawes of filling in prescriptions with the names of people “for whom no treatment was being given”.

The prosecution told the court the case is not about whether any physical harm had been caused but “this case is about the defendant not adhering to the rules and regulations around the prescribing, possessing and supply of prescription only medicines”.

The trial continues.