A nurse used a broom handle to hit a “very vulnerable” patient over the head in a hospital ward, a jury heard.

Philomena Judge slapped the frail man over the head with her hand on a ward at the psychiatric hospital where she worked.

A jury was told that the 54-year-old nurse was caught administering the ill treatment when a colleague spotted her through a window of the ward and alerted managers.

Prosecutors said that Judge prodded the “very vulnerable” man in the chest with the broom before hitting him on the head with the handle, causing him to cry out.

“I heard him screamy-shouting in a very frustrated way,” social worker Louise Byrne who saw the attack told jurors at Reading Crown Court.

Turning to look out of the window of her second-floor office, which looked straight into a unit at Prospect Park Hospital, Honey End Lane, Tilehurst, where Judge worked as a staff nurse, Ms Byrne said: “That’s when I saw the broom handle.”

“It wasn’t continuous, it was in bouts. I saw the broom handle come up and bang him on his head.

“He was moving himself away, kind of flinching and moving his head away from the broom.

“I could see his body language, that’s how clearly I could see him.”

She then told how she saw a woman walk towards him and “cuff” him on his head with her hand.

The extremely vulnerable patient had “severe mental impairment”, little speaking ability and lacked the capacity to understand general conversation, said prosecutor John Riley.

He was wearing a spongey black hat at the time, which was to protect himself from self-harm.

“It was just hitting someone who was in a very, very vulnerable position,” Mr Riley told the jury.

The court heard that stunned Ms Byrne ran next door to get her boss and the two of them peered out of the window to the opposite building, about 40 yards away.

“I couldn’t believe what I had just seen,” she told the jury of seven men and five women.

“He (my boss) got down to the position that I had been in and he saw more of the same.”

After seeing more smacks from the broom handle, Byrne’s manager Derek Mitchell, quickly rang the ward’s management, telling them to get to the room immediately.

Mr Mitchell, a joint service manager, said the patient was “increasingly distressed”.

“He was shouting out.”

Judge, a staff nurse on the Campion Unit, denies a single count of ill-treating a person who lacks mental capacity over the incident on October 24, 2013.

In a meeting with ward management and then in her police statement, Judge, of Kevins Drive, Yateley, said she had been trying to calm the patient down and that she had been waving the handle by the left hand side of his head to try to distract him. She told how she had taken the broom into the room with her because she was going to use it to sweep up toys the patient had been playing with.

To keep him from becoming more agitated, she said she tried to get him to take part in cleaning up the toys.

The trial continues.