A woman who feigned having cancer in order to help defraud the charity she worked for out of more than £85,000 has been jailed by a judge who told her she had shown no shame.

Patricia Robertshaw, 42, was jailed for more than four years after she pretended that she was having radiotherapy to earn three months’ sick pay from Yorkshire Cancer Research in Harrogate, where she worked as an events manager.

While off work, she used fake degree certificates to apply for jobs at other companies, having used the same fraudulent documents to get her job at the charity.

York crown court heard how Robertshaw, of Barrowford, Lancashire, had produced three bogus degree certificates.

They were for a masters in science and a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Leeds and a masters in project management from Leeds Metropolitan University.

Prosecutors said the documents had helped her to negotiate a £10,250 pay rise, which she earned for seven months, earning a total of £86,833 while working at the charity between September 2015 and November 2017.

The court heard that Robertshaw’s web of lies unravelled when other workers at the charity scanned the QR codes on the sick note forms she had submitted and found they were invalid.

She pleaded guilty to four counts of fraud and one of forgery.

Handing her a sentence of four years and five months on Thursday, Judge Andrew Stubbs QC told her: “Embedded in the charity as you were, you would have known the good that money would have done.”

Discussing her attempts to feign cancer, he said: “Those claims were as bogus as the qualifications you had used. This led to you claiming, without any apparent sense of shame, that you had cancer while working for a cancer charity.

“The charity relies upon the generosity of the public and, as a result, those who should have benefited from the research will have been impacted in some degree by the fraud of the defendant.”

Robert Sandford, prosecuting, esaid Robertshaw had started to fake having cancer in April 2016, saying she was having treatment at Airedale general hospital in Bradford and Barrowford surgery in Nelson, Lancashire, until she was found out in November 2017.

Her employers had twice offered her independent health assessments, but she refused on both occasions. While on three-month sick leave, she applied for roles as an events and commercial lead at Manchester city council and as the head of income generation at the Pendleside hospice in Burnley.

The court heard she had received a conditional offer from the council, which would have paid her a salary of £49,313, and that she was close to getting an offer from the hospice, which had advertised a salary of £36,075.

In a previous role at Leeds Beckett University, she was responsible for sending off students’ assessments to the relevant exam board. In order to save herself work, the court heard, she forged invalid certificates for 55 students.

The court was told that the university has had to pay £500 settlements to 36 of the students, who were studying leadership and management.

Catherine Silverton, defending, said Rothershaw had a history of mental health issues and borderline personality disorder. “The defendant wishes to express through me her deepest remorse and regret for these offences. She acknowledges the harm done to all of the victims,” she said.