Doctors and nurses have to make important decisions every bloody moment of their working days. The last freaking laugh they need is inane “prank” calls from idiot fucking arseholes at 5am.
RIP Jacintha Saldahna
They’re taking a quite a beating in the comments section of the local “TMZ-Style” story on the subject: here
Personally, I’d just like to know if the station management and/or the on-air personalities involved have anything to say on the subject.
minor hijack: Is it a Britishism to have "It is understood that … " in their legalese for newspapers?
…
/minor hijack
Let me get this straight: a couple of radio DJs called the hospital pretending to be who they are not, yes? When my husband was in the ICU, I was required to create for the staff a password of sorts; anyone who had the password could call for updates or info and anyone who didn’t was politely but firmly told to fuck off (or, however the uber-professional ICU nurses would say it). Is that not how it’s done in the UK?
I guess I’m the only one who thinks its a very stupid thing to get upset about let alone kill yourself over. Unless they are all now lying the hospital and the palace were not giving her a hard time about it. Seems to me there had to be a lot more going on with her. Which is possibly why she was being used as a receptionist rather than a nurse. But that last is just wild speculation on my part.
No, if you sound like a dotty old lady and have someone doing fake corgi barks in the background, that’s apparently enough.
Really, I can’t get behind this pitting. Yes, the two Aussies pulled a dumb-ass prank, but this nurse almost certainly had specific training on when she could release confidential health information, and she should have known not to dispense it on that call. And upon realizing the depth and consequences of her own dumb-ass mistake, she KILLS herself?!
Phone pranks are always stupid and never funny and pointless deaths are to be mourned.
I really can’t assign any blame on the pranksters. I used to make phony phone calls when I was a child – oh no! What if they found out they didn’t have Prince Albert in a can and killed themselves!
There had to have been other issues with the nurse/receptionist, and I don’t see how you blame the callers for that.
Every time I think about how the call went, I imagine the caller sounding like Terry Jones from Monty Python.
As I read the story, she did not provide any confidential information - she connected the call to the duty nurse, who was the one that provided the information.
Actually, the nurse who committed suicide didn’t divulge any information herself. She passed on the call to the nurse who did divulge the information.
I read a different story, then. The version I saw saw was that there was no on-duty receptionist at the time (reported as 530 am) and the nurse picked up the call directly. If she just handed the call on to another nurse, then her suicide is even less understandable.
I’m sure I’ve seen it regularly used in the UK press and it’s simply a short form of “this is what a source told us but we haven’t checked the facts yet”
More commonly used is “allegedly”, but that’s more often used when making insinuations (especially in Private Eye)
I’m still mystified … she passed on a phone call, and then killed herself? The implication is that this is some sort of seppuku, an atonement for making a mistake that many people might make… huh?
Can someone here call the hospital and get the real story? (ooh, too soon?)
She’s part of an embarrassing story, and her voice is heard on an embarrassing recording, that instantly became a news story around the world. No doubt she breathlessly told her colleague, “It’s the Queen!”, and blamed herself for humiliating her colleague.
Can any Brits address the question: “Is that enough to kill yourself over?” The Japanese side of my family talks a lot about “saving face”, or “not bringing embarrassment to your family”. Is that at play in this case?
In the good ol’ US of A, she’d get to go on talk shows, and might even wind up with a Reality TV Show.
“No doubt”?
Well there is perhaps a lingering impression of Brits making the “ultimate sacrifice” a la Scott of the Antarctic, in this sort of situation, no, I don’t really think that’s expected behaviour over here.
She didn’t kill herself…she was murdered! By the Queen! In the foyer, with the scepter.
With royal privacy being such a touchy issue these days, you can bet the hospital came down pretty hard on the nurses involved and I have a feeling that had more to do with the suicide than actually falling for the prank. If that’s the case, it’s still hard to blame the hospital if she wasn’t able to handle a good talking to. Chalk it up to another senseless tragedy in the whirling maelstrom of human events.
Having said that, pranking like this capitalizes on human weakness for the sake of a superior laugh, and I groan at the immaturity of supposed adults like the DJ’s in this case. That doesn’t mean the blame can be pinned on them for the nurse’s drastic reaction, but I hope the perpetrators are suffering some kind of mental anguish over it.
Or sue the radio station for a million-thousand dollars.
Either you are wrong or they are lying through their teeth.
“We can confirm that Jacintha was recently the victim of a hoax call to the hospital. The hospital had been supporting her throughout this difficult time.”