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A hospital trust has been forced to apologise after photographs of a grinning nurse giving a V-sign over a patient during surgery were published online.
A series of pictures on Facebook also showed staff pointing their bottoms at the camera and a nurse cleaning a pool of blood off an operating theatre floor using only a piece of plastic.
The photographs were taken in 2006 at the height of an outbreak of the "superbug" Clostridium difficile which killed at least 90 patients in hospitals run by the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust - the worst such incident in NHS history.
A trust spokesman said: "The behaviour of the member of staff during the operation and that of the person taking the photograph is clearly unacceptable and completely unprofessional.
"If one hadn't left the trust and the other retired some years ago they would now be facing disciplinary action.
"We have reminded all staff in no uncertain terms that this type of behaviour is absolutely unacceptable."
Reader views (2)
Good to see NHS staff are looking lean and fit !!
- Nick Holland, glasgow
Sorry to disillusion everyone, but the human beings that work in operating theatres talk and joke amongst themselves like everyone else does - that doesn't mean they are not concentrating when they need to be. Been there, done that - so I DO know what I'm talking about.
The bit about "a nurse cleaning a pool of blood off an operating theatre floor using only a piece of plastic"? It's unlikely this was all there was to it. They watched this cleaning from start to finish did they? They've traced infections on the patient concerned back to this snapshot in time have they?
All I see here is yet another example of idiot 'camera owners' being driven by some stupid need to 'contribute' to the Facebook nonsense without the least regard to what is seen and by whom - nor of how viewers will try their level best to interpret what they see negatively.
Technology ain't always progress! Where was Ludd when we needed him?!
- Rogan, Irving
