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A registered nurse who brought makeshift weapons into a care home and urged colleagues to prepare for an armed confrontation against Muslims has been struck off the medical register by the Nursing and Midwifery Council. Belinda Ellams, an agency nurse stationed at Millbrow Care Home in Widnes, Cheshire, was found to have engaged in severe misconduct driven by blatant anti-Muslim hostility during the heightened national tensions following the July 2024 Southport stabbings. Daily Dazzling Dawn understands that the disciplinary panel ordered her immediate removal from the profession after determining that her actions compromised the safety of both vulnerable residents and staff members while perpetuating harmful Islamophobic narratives.
Unfounded Conspiracies and Hostile Rhetoric
The Nursing and Midwifery Council fitness to practise panel heard extensive evidence detailing how Ellams began promoting hateful conspiracy theories shortly after the tragic Southport knife attack on 29 July 2024. In the immediate aftermath, Ellams falsely asserted to colleagues that the attacker was a radicalised Muslim and claimed that public authorities were actively suppressing the truth. Rather than offering calm and clinical reassurance inside a residential healthcare facility, Ellams propagated alarmist claims that Muslims were building an army to kill white citizens.
Daily Dazzling Dawn learned that Ellams repeatedly deployed dehumanising slurs inside the workplace, routinely referring to Muslims with derogatory language and declaring that communities were lying in wait to launch coordinated attacks. On 4 August 2024, she instructed staff at Millbrow Care Home to lock all external doors and windows to prevent Muslims from gaining access, escalating anxiety within an environment designed to provide safety and palliative care to elderly residents.
Weapons Brought into Residential Care
The tribunal heard alarming testimony regarding physical items Ellams introduced into the workplace under the guise of self-defence. Witness Michelle Isaac, a healthcare assistant on shift with Ellams, recorded contemporaneous notes describing how the senior nurse attempted to distribute weapons. During a break, Ellams handed Isaac a pair of sharpened nail scissors, explicitly instructing her to keep them close to defend herself against feared attacks by Muslims.
Furthermore, the panel found that Ellams brought a chain loaded with weighted steel balls into the care home. In front of her colleagues, she demonstrated how the weighted implement could be swung to inflict physical injury on an assailant. The tribunal determined that introducing dangerous objects into a healthcare setting and demonstrating their use as offensive weapons constituted a fundamental breach of professional standards that endangered everyone on site.
Online Incitement and Professional Sanctions
In addition to workplace misconduct, the regulatory panel examined Ellams’s external activity on social media. On 30 July 2024, Ellams published an inflammatory and offensive image on Facebook depicting an aggressive stereotype of a Muslim man menacing a child, accompanied by text claiming that the government was failing to protect the public. The panel concluded that this online activity directly reflected a pattern of deep-seated hostility towards Muslims, relying on damaging tropes that unfairly frame an entire religious minority as inherently violent and dangerous.
Ellams denied the allegations in written correspondence to the Nursing and Midwifery Council, stating she was appalled by the proceedings and claiming she had departed the profession due to what she described as a toxic working environment. The panel rejected her defence, concluding that her fitness to practise was fundamentally impaired. Emphasising that healthcare professionals must protect patients and uphold public trust without prejudice, the panel imposed an 18-month interim suspension alongside a formal striking-off order, permanently barring Ellams from nursing practice.
