An adult care nurse whose English was so bad she replied: “I do not know anything about gardening,” when asked by colleagues about safeguarding has been ordered to stop working until her skills improve.

Luminita Cosara worked at the Whiteley Village Care Centre, just off Burwood Road in Hersham, between October 1 and November 7, 2014.

She was hired from abroad through a recruitment agency after a Skype interview, a Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) hearing was told, but the registered nurse failed to “demonstrate a sufficient understanding of the English language”.

Miss Cosara was later reassigned to a health assistant role, but was found to have copied previous entries into new pages of patients’ daily logbooks.

Other nurses were also understood to have “appeared to follow the practice of repeating earlier notes and phrases”.

Documents showed Miss Cosara had been continuously supervised by other nurses, but had never been challenged by them in relation to writing repetitive notes.

One colleague advised her to “consider other notes in order to establish how notes were to be written”, which the panel concluded had contributed to the mistakes.

The panel found last Thursday that Miss Cosara’s poor level of English “had, and still has, the potential to put patients at unwarranted risk of harm”, but took into consideration how she gave a “good level of insight” and apologised for taking the job when she knew her English was not sufficient.

Panellists at the hearing, held from January 18 to 21, said there was no evidence Miss Cosara had been dishonest about her poor English because she had sent an email to the care centre before she started work detailing her desire to improve.

They added a suspension order would be “wholly disproportionate” as “removing a caring and committed nurse from the register” would not be in the public interest.

The panel said that a conditions of practice order would be in place for a year, which restricts Miss Cosara from working as a registered nurse until she has completed an English course.

She must also inform her course provider, agency, and prospective employers of the panel’s findings.