Overwhelming workloads and understaffing at a prison's medical unit likely contributed to the death of a disabled inmate who suffered an epileptic seizure, an inquest has heard.
A prison nurse has been grilled over the death of Wayne Hunt after he suffered the seizure at Darwin Correctional Centre on August 29, 2024.
Mr Hunt became combative after the seizure and struggled against prison guards who roughly handled him, pinning him down on a mattress, handcuffing him and putting him in a spit hood.
He was bundled off in a wheelchair to the medical unit but instead of being given a full medical check was left naked on the floor of an "at-risk" cell.
The 56-year-old was found unresponsive in the cell the next morning and rushed to hospital where he died two days later.
He was only days into a sentence for dangerous driving causing death after he accidentally hit his ute's accelerator and fatally crushed an 11-year-old boy against a wall at a supermarket.
Questioned by Mary Chalmers, counsel assisting Coroner Elisabeth Armitage, the nurse on Thursday agreed he and his employer, NT Health, had failed to care for Mr Hunt.
He admitted failing to carry out a series of medical tests on the new inmate as required under the jail's epilepsy treatment guidelines.
As a nursing team leader at the prison he was overloaded with other work and was unable to carry out the tests.
Mr Hunt was also in an at-risk cell, not in a room with the medical testing equipment, he said.
The nurse earlier told the inquest he asked prison guards to move Mr Hunt to a resuscitation room but was "brushed aside" by officers.
The medical unit was understaffed and remains so, he said.
"It overloaded me ... that's why I failed to do a lot of things I was supposed to do."
The prison guard population was also understaffed, the nurse said, leading to pushback from guards when medical staff wanted to do transfers to hospital.
In one case an officer told the medical unit "no one is going to hospital unless they are dying".
It was only a matter of time before another death occurred when medical staff were overloaded, he said.
Ms Armitage observed the prison staffing issue was unsustainable "for the risks that it creates".
The nurse told the inquest he was concerned at the rough handling of Mr Hunt by the Immediate Action Team, known as Ninja Turtles due to their body armour.
He told the inquest he was "non-confrontational" and lacked confidence to ask the guards to stop roughly handling a disabled inmate who had just had an epileptic seizure.
Mr Hunt had a prosthetic limb after losing his leg in a motorbike accident in 2008.
The nurse gave Mr Hunt a sedative to calm him but did not accompany the guards taking him to the medical unit in a wheelchair and did not know until later that officers had put a spit hood on him.
"I felt terrible for Mr Hunt, having a spit hood put on him ... I felt it was unnecessary," the nurse said.
The inquest continues.
