The combustible combination of a cell phone camera and MySpace account confronts us once again this morning with evidence that the human capacity for depravity knows no bounds. In this example, we have two emergency room workers fired from the University of New Mexico Hospital for posting pictures of injured patients to the Internet.
From the Associated Press:
Director of Public Affairs Sam Giammo said Sunday the photos – mainly close-ups of injuries being treated in the Albuquerque hospital’s emergency room over the past few months – were posted on an employee’s private MySpace page.
UNMH values patient privacy “very, very highly and we will do everything we can to protect them,” Giammo said. “We just won’t tolerate unprofessional actions by any of our staff. We just won’t stand for that.”
Who would you have thought that the hospital — or any hospital — needed to make explicit in a memo or training program or something that snapping pics of patient injuries and posting them to the Internet is prohibited? (Not that there’s any humor here, but the story does remind of the Seinfeld episode where George, having just heard that he was fired, quizzed his now ex-boss about company policy relative to having sex on his desk with a member of the cleaning crew: “Was that wrong? Should I not have done that? I tell you, I gotta plead ignorance on this thing, because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here that that sort of thing is frowned upon … you know, cause I’ve worked in a lot of offices, and I tell you, people do that all the time.”
Let’s hope such is not the case with shutterbugs in emergency rooms.
