A rash of incidents in hospitals across the country involving camera phones has led to firings -- and the realization that monitoring the devices in clinical facilities is no easy task.
After sorting through red tape, a California hospital has fired nine employees who in April either took or looked at camera-phone photos of a patient's X-ray. Meanwhile, at least three other hospitals across the country are struggling with similar problems.
"I think all hospitals in the United States are going to have to deal with (camera-phone use)," said Suellyn Ellerbe, chief executive officer of Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside, California, a suburb north of San Diego. Photo-equipped PDAs, which doctors frequently use, pose special problems, said Ellerbe, whose hospital fired the nine workers.
Camera phones are a difficult privacy issue for medical institutions because regulations banning them -- which already exist in many hospitals -- are difficult to enforce. But high-profile cases may be spreading the word that taking pictures on the job can lead to unemployment.
Tri-City Medical executives fired employees -- including emergency-medical technicians, nurses and secretaries -- whether they took photos of the X-ray or simply looked at them without reporting the incident, Ellerbe said. One other employee was suspended without pay, said hospital spokesman Jeff Segall.
Ellerbe declined to give details about the X-ray except to say it did not disclose the patient's identity.
In another case at Tri-City Medical, a security guard stopped a secretary from taking a camera-phone picture of a suicidal psychiatric patient. The secretary resigned, Segall said.
Hospital regulations ban photography without permission and forbid employees from using cell phones on the job, Ellerbe said. Signs also remind visitors not to use camera phones.
In another camera-phone case, a former respiratory therapist at Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego faces felony charges over allegations that he took eight photographs of two bedridden children using a cell phone, said Steve Walker, spokesman for the San Diego County District Attorney's Office. Contrary to a newspaper report, he said none of the images were distributed on the internet.
In response to the problems, hospital administrators have banned staff from using cell phones in clinical areas, and all cell phones are forbidden in the convalescent unit, said administrator Pamela Dixon. But doctors, who are not employees of the hospital, refused to allow a ban on their use of cell phones.
Another case, in Iowa City, Iowa, involved a May 18 newspaper article that police were investigating reports that someone took nude photos of nursing residents with a camera phone. Cell phones reportedly are now banned at the facility.
It's unclear how many hospitals have policies regulating camera phones, but their numbers seem to be growing. Last year, the Southern California hospital chain Scripps Health added camera phones and PDAs to its policies restricting photography, although they are not officially banned.
Scripps Health, which runs five hospitals and 13 outpatient clinics, told Wired News it has fired employees in the last month for violating photography rules, although fewer than a dozen of its 11,000 employees have been sacked for privacy violations over the past year.
While some hospital attorneys told Wired News they'd never dealt with the camera-phone issue, others said they'd discussed methods of enforcing a ban.
"They could search everybody's purse, but I don't think that's an environment that health-care facilities want," said Katherine Benesch, an health-law attorney in Princeton, New Jersey, who has helped nursing homes create policies banning camera phones.
Posting signs and writing policies, however, can't prevent all photography in hospitals, especially when it's done with such easily concealed devices.
Ultimately, said Dr. David Cameron, a physician and health-law attorney in Toronto, "there isn't a lot of power that the hospital has to keep these things from happening."
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