A nurse from SOMC is facing an intense backlash after violating the privacy of a patient by contacting him for a possible date. It all started when the patient went to SOMC Urgent Care for treatment.
Around 8 am on Tuesday, the patient – who is unnamed for privacy reasons – visited SOMC Urgent Care on Kinneys Lane for treatment.
Later that day, he received troubling text messages from an unidentified person. The first one read, “I hope you don’t mind. I just wanted to tell you that you are very good lookin.”
When the patient asked who was sending the text, the sender said, “If I tell you, you’re going to think I’m weird.”
The patient then demanded to know, “Who the hell is this.”
That’s when the nurse responded, “No need to be rude, I was your nurse earlier.”
The patient told SCDN they were terrified by this violation of privacy and provided screenshots of the conversation and the number it came from. The patient immediately contacted the hospital to report the incident.
When SCDN contacted the nurse, she admitted to the stunning privacy violation. “I’m a new nurse. I was already in the patient’s chart documenting. I noticed he was nice looking. Just figured, I didn’t really think that it would be HIPAA since I had already seen it.”
She said a supervisor had spoken to her and informed her that her actions were a violation of HIPAA rules and that she would likely be fired.
The nurse added, “We’re all human and make mistakes.”
Neither the patient nor SCDN has received any official communication regarding this incident from SOMC.
A local attorney said, “This is going to rock the hospital.”
This is a snippet of the conversation SCDN had with the nurse.
