Hospital employees post patients' pictures on Web site
The Associated Press
Monday, September 22, 2008
ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico: Two employees of a U.S. hospital have been fired for using cellphone cameras to take photographs of patients who were receiving treatment and then posting the images to a social networking Web site.
Sam Giammo, the director of public affairs at University of New Mexico Hospital, said Sunday that the photographs - mainly close-ups of injuries being treated in the Albuquerque hospital's emergency room over the past few months - had been posted on an employee's private MySpace page.
Giammo said he had never heard of a similar incident at the University of New Mexico Hospital or any other hospital.
A few other hospital employees were disciplined and the investigation is continuing, he said.
The hospital values patients' 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."
The photographs were discovered after a hospital supervisor received an anonymous tip about them Tuesday.
Hospital managers personally oversaw the removal of the photographs from the Web site and from the employees' cellphones, Giammo said.
The patients in the photographs could not be notified that their pictures had been taken because their faces and personal identifying features had been removed from the photos, Giammo said.
Giammo said the MySpace page could be accessed only by the employee's online friends, not by the general public.
Giammo said the employees who were fired had violated a hospital policy that bans the use of cellphone cameras in patient areas. The other employees were disciplined for not bringing the photographs to the attention of managers, he said.
The use of cellphone cameras in hospitals has caused breaches of patient privacy or concern about such violations in California, Arizona and South Dakota in recent years.
