An NHS kidney specialist who swindled nearly £68,000 from the health service to pay his £800,000 gambling debts is not allowed to return to hospital work.
Dr Aled Meirion Jones, 41, stole 420 cheques from the bereavement services department at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff over a two year period.
Jones also forged cheques and made claims for shifts he did not work while employed as a registrar in the nephrology and transplant unit.
He claimed for locum shifts he had not worked at four hospitals.
Jones, who developed a gambling addiction while studying at Oxford University, had ‘frittered away’ up to £800,000.
His flat was repossessed after he failed to make mortgage payments
Jones was sentenced to a suspended two year sentence and ordered to do 200 hours of unpaid work after swindling the NHS out of nearly £68,000
He was sentenced to two years in prison in March 2021, suspended for two years, and in1play was ordered to work 200 hours of unpaid work.
Jones’s medical licence was suspended for at least twelve months in October 2021.
The tribunal held a review hearing after Jones applied to return to work, which looked at evidence about Jones’s recovery from his addiction.
On December 1 the tribunal concluded that Jones was not ready to return to hospital work and agreed to extend his suspension for a further four months.
Investigators discovered that Jones had a gambling addiction, which started when he bet on World Cup football matches while studying medicine at Oxford University.
Jones said it was difficult to pin down exactly when his gambling became pathological, but recalls first betting as a student.
‘It was at university when there was a promotion in the newspaper and my friends were all doing a bet where you put £10 down and whether you won or lost you got your £10 back,’ he said.
Jones, 41, lost £10,000 in one night in 2009 while betting on a tennis match between Roger Federer and Juan Martín del Potro
Cardiff Crown Court heard last year that Jones thought ‘there was no victim’ when he stole 420 cheques from a bereavement office at the University Hospital of Wales
‘That’s when the seed of gambling was planted in my head.’
Jones lost £10,000 in one night in 2009 on a US Open tennis match between Roger Federer and Juan Martín del Potro.
Cardiff Crown Court was told last year that Jones’s flat was repossessed when he failed to pay his mortgage.
Jones said his addiction was ‘catastrophic’ and had lost him £800,000.
‘I’m enormously ashamed and I always will be, but I can’t change the past and all I can do is recover and try to do good things,’ he said.
‘When I try to explain this to people who may not have experienced addiction, I don’t know how they can understand because I struggle with it myself.’
Cardiff Crown Court also heard that Jones ‘thought there was no victim’ when he took cheques from a bereavement office and cashed in nearly £34,000 between March 2017 and March 2019.
He pleaded guilty to fraud by abuse of position and fraud by false representation.
