A care assistant who stole hundreds from the elderly people she cared for has been jailed.

Susan Browne, 43, was caught during a police sting after staff became suspicious about money going missing from residents at the Dorothy Lucy Centre in Maidstone.

Marked notes were planted in the wallet of a patient at the centre, in Northumberland Road, and night shift carer Browne took it.

She was arrested by police when she left the next morning. After initially denying the theft, she later admitted it when police proved she had touched the notes because she had yellow marks on her fingers from them.

Browne, a mother of one, then admitted she had been stealing from patients, some of whom were in their 90s, during the four years she had worked there.

Browne was jailed for 84 days for the thefts.

Chairman of the bench, Tina Richards, said: “Only a custodial sentence can be justified her as the offences are so serious."