Even when staff adhere to privacy rules, your fellow patients may invade your medical privacy. Martin Shipton reports:
A patient who took photographs of an elderly fellow patient in a hospital bed and posted them with insulting comments on a Facebook site has been accused of an “appalling” breach of privacy.
A photograph on Facebook shows two women lying in adjacent beds in Nevill Hall Hospital, Abergavenny last week. One appears elderly and frail.
I won’t repeat some of the unkind comments posted on the Facebook page reported by Shipton, but he notes that the picture was reproduced on other Facebook pages with even more unkind remarks. You can read the full article on WalesOnline.
How preventable are these types of patient-patient breaches, though? The hospital already had a policy in place about not taking pictures with cellphones. Do all patients have that policy pointed out to them and do they sign an explicit statement that they will not violate other patients’ privacy?
The hospital also requested that Facebook remove the pictures. Shipton doesn’t report whether that has happened or not.