Nurse Assaulted

Monday, 05 September 2005
7 DAYS
http://www.7days.ae/local-news/nurse-assaulted.html

This man hit his receptionist in the face with a phone. He got a dhs500 fine. She got four stitches and faces a six month ban. A dental nurse who was assaulted by her boss faces being banned from the country after he reported her as an absconder.

Grace Castello was celebrating her 30th birthday when Dr Mohamed Nihad Mohammed Gouma, a dentist based in the Comprehensive Medical Centre at the Crown Plaza in Dubai, lost his temper over the time of an appointment and hit her over the head with the telephone.

“I was asking a patient to come to the clinic at 2.00pm instead of 4.00pm. I was surprised when he started shouting at me and took the phone from my hand and hit me with it.

He hit me with the telephone so hard that I had a cut on my forehead and I started bleeding,” Castello, from the Philippines, said. A surgeon in the same building gave her four stitches, she said.

The case eventually went to court, where Gouma was found guilty and ordered to pay dhs500 compensation for the attack. When Castello said she was too afraid to return to work, she was reported as an absconder, and she could now be banned from the country for six months.

“He wanted to settle the case amicably and I refused, hoping that this man learns a lesson,” she said. “But I feel he has got away with a mild punishment - even for a traffic violation we get the same fine.

“My sponsor had warned me that I was digging my own grave and now I feel he is right,” she said. When contacted by 7DAYS, Dr Gouma claimed Castello had fallen over and invented the story. He hung up when told 7DAYS had seen court documents on the case.

Siza Darwish, the patient who was on the other end of the phone when Castello was attacked, said she could hear a man screaming. “Then I heard a bang and she [Castello] was crying.

“The call was disconnected after a while,” Darwish told 7DAYS. Despite repeated requests, Dr Gouma’s sponsor refused to comment on the case.