A GP who withdrew more than $138,000 from the financial accounts of an elderly former patient she befriended has been suspended for 12 months for breaching professional boundaries.

At the time, the doctor had become the patient’s nominated enduring power of attorney and a signatory on the woman’s two bank accounts.

The Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal said the GP had 26 consultations with the patient between 2012 and 2013, during which she discussed her sadness over the deaths of her husband and daughter, her isolation and her fear that using services would result in her being placed in a home.

The GP wrote that the patient – who grew up in Russia, lived in Germany in 1941 and was a former prisoner of war – lived alone and that she planned to visit her “as a friend, not a GP”.