Not sure what you’re disputing - it was the main switchboard I was talking about. I’ve never seen a receptionist on a ward.
Now we all know that the palace would have the private mobile number of the obstetricians and wouldn’t be calling the ward like some mook. But this is all 20-20 hindsight.
From the nurses perspective, she gets an unexpected call with less than a second to respond, and what if it is the Queen? Saying, in essence, “Fuck off, Your Majesty” is pretty ballsy, and has the serious potential to be a career limiting move. So she gives an anodyne response. It’s easy to say the hospital should have had a protocol, but stacks of royals have been hospitalised without this problem arising. Anticipating this particular problem as opposed to all the other possible ones (bomb hoaxes, paps dressed as nurses sneaking in and taking photos, etc) without any lengthy lead up to the Duchess’s hospitalisation is just applying the retrospectoscope. In the absence of a terrorist threat, a full security lockdown of the sort that would cure all these hypotheticals is overkill.
Did the pranksters cause the nurse’s death? Probably, in the straw that broke the camel’s back sense. Was it foreseeable? Defendants in civil litigation are required to forsee that some people are particularly vulnerable (such as the blind, the deaf, the wheelchair bound) and might be affected by their actions in the way that a member of the majority of the population might not. Should the pranksters have foreseen that a nurse apparently capable of working the royal shift was particularly vulnerable? Tough call. Broadcasting without the assent of relevant people including the nurse tips the scales against them for mine, but YMMV. Does the prank call industry need to go into the hall of mirrors and have a good hard look at itself and the assumptions it operates under? Bloody oath.
The royal family is most of the problem. There would have been no prank without their fame and riches.
At least the rich and famous in America usually have DONE something to ‘deserve’ their fame.
You mean being born to the right family?
I can imagine the radio station being liable if she’d been fired. As Lewis says in the column I linked to, despite the potential high pressures of her job, nobody can think of a suicide or anything even close to one in similar cases.
I think you’re using the word “deserve” in such a lax way that it hardly even matters. The royal family are basically England’s reality show.
I would like to amend my previous statement. It’s not their wealth and fame that caused this…can you imagine someone killing themselves over revealing Paris Hilton’s medical info?
It’s their status…their completely undeserved, exalted status.
In other words: even though there’s no logical reason this woman should have killed herself over this prank call, there’s no way she would have reacted this way if it the DJs had been asking about an extremely famous actress or an extremely rich and famous person who was not a future queen? I find this royal stuff intolerable but I think it’s impossible to say that with any confidence.
No, it’s because a couple of British DJs behaved like unmitigated assholes.
A pregnant woman has morning sickness and is admitted to the hospital. These two gems take it on themselves to call the hospital up and harass the staff as a result, and get them to release private medical information that is nobody’s business.
Charming.
Regards,
Shodan
Very little info was released, and the djs were Australian.
And it was obviously a hoax. They couldn’t have expected to be taken seriously.
As sad as this situation is I have to believe the nurse had some serious personal problems going on to kill herself over this.
And while I’m not fond of radio show phone pranks I don’t blame the DJ’s one tiny bit for her suicide.
Surely you can put your incredible ability to read the minds of the dead to better use.
I’m in a position to answer questions about standard telephone procedure on one NHS hospital in the UK (Frimley Park) as my father was a frequent patient before his death, often being taken in by ambulance in the middle of the night.
Phoning the hospital number got you on to an automated system. It gave you the option of saying the name of the ward or the person you were calling or speaking to an operator. Once through to the ward in working hours they had admin staff on the ward who would answer the phone then call over the appropriate member of staff. Out of hours the phone was picked up by whoever was free, who would either answer your queries herself to put you on to someone who could.
They won’t tell you anything unless you are a relative however they only have your word for it. When a friend with no close relatives was seriously ill in hospital his housemate would phone and say he was a cousin.
People should be focusing not on the faeces being smeared by the tabloids, but on what, if any, pressures were placed on the woman subsequent to the gag; by the hospital, the media, of import, her family (husband) et al.
The woman was irrefutably unhinged to begin with; to fly the face of her most primal human instinct - to live - second only to her maternal instinct to nurture her progeny into adulthood. Any questions that should be asked should be of:
- Her employer, as to what reprimand they issued to her (‘none’ being a blatant lie).
- Buckingham Palace, in their assumëd negligence in failing to contact the woman involved to assuage her predictable fears of possible repercussions.
- The media, in effectively lambasting her as part of the frivolous, infantile incident in a paparazzi culture notorious enough to be argued to have Princess Diana’s blood on it hands.
- The woman’s family - particularly her spouse - and what possible psychological pressure may have been placed on her. Being sub-continental Indians, they’re a culture that’s quite heavy on the familial pride and humiliation thang.
- The radio network and whether correct protocols were followed following such pranks (e.g., were they provided permission to use the audio by those involved?).
Wow, quite a substantive response.
Seriously, extreme differences in status are not good for society. I somehow doubt that this person would have killed herself over this incident if it hadn’t been publicized and also if it weren’t regarding royalty. That’s not to say she wasn’t unbalanced to begin with, but she can’t have been TOTALLY crazy…she managed to hold down a job as a nurse in an exclusive private hospital, for instance.
Very few people commit suicide for logical reasons.
Do you plan to get around to explaining why that is?
Yes. Which means it’s hard to say that this kind of thing would never occur under slightly different circumstances.
Fwiw, I’m disgusted everything related to this matter is being aired in public, led by a hospital administration desperate - a little too desperate imo - to show how wonderfully it behaved.
This is basically a private matter about a very small and insignificant breach of personal information.
Fuck the media obsession with sensationalist narratives, fuck the public’s disregard for privacy, and fuck that hospitals’ faux hand-wringing concern.
Uh… what?
-A reprimand (in the classic sense of the world of business) involves some kind of penalty. There is no indication this occurred. She made a mistake and it was certainly explained to her which is something that happens to millions of people every day.
-It’s unreasonable to act as if every mistake a person makes is going to launch them into suicide mode and reach out to them. This applies to the hospital, the Royal Family and the media.
Her family would probably best be able to see signs of distress but even the driving force behind suicide is often masked. I can’t address if her Indian culture added to the situation but this was a pretty minor transgression on her part. The nurse who actually gave out the information is more in the spotlight. If she was truly unhinged to begin with then her coworkers would have been the next group to see signs of distress. But if she was perceived as unhinged then she would have been viewed as a liability as a health care professional.
I don’t see at this point where this could have been easily averted. She wasn’t harassed in a way that would drive a normal person to suicide. The blame for this was likely a medical condition.
If no one had found out what she did, SHE HERSELF wouldn’t have known she’d been pranked. It only came to light after it was broadcast on the radio.
Somehow I doubt violating an average citizen’s privacy in that way would have made it on the radio.
If you would like, I’d also be happy to explain the difference between royal status and merely rich/famous status as well.