Hospital Employee Fired, Arrested For Having Nude Picture Of A Patient On His Cell Phone

A hospital employee was fired after his coworkers found a nude picture of a patient on his cell phone, KXAN in Austin, Texas, is reporting.

The incident happened March 27, but is only now gaining attention in the national media.

Police say employees at a nurse’s station at Austin’s Shoal Creek Hospital found a cell phone plugged into an outlet. Not knowing whom it belonged to, they looked through it to try to identify its owner; not only did they find its owner, but they also found a nude picture of a showering female — a female they recognized as a patient.

Forty-seven-year-old hospital employee Cazzie Marcellous Kirk was called into the office of the Director of Nursing, according to KVUE, Austin. He admitted the cell phone was his, but he had a perfectly reasonable explanation for why there was a nude photo of a showering female patient on his phone: he was giving her a towel, and it must have snapped a picture accidentally when it was in his pocket.

The hospital worker was escorted off the premises by hospital security and relieved of his job. Security officers “helped” him delete the nude patient photo off of his phone.

Kirk was arrested and charged with improper photography and held on $6,000 bail.

Though the idea is horrifying, this is not the first time that a hospital employee has been found to have taken pictures of a patient, nude or otherwise. In July, 2014, according to KCCI in Des Moines, Iowa, hospital employee Kimberly Niedert used her cell phone to take a nude photo of a female patient who was being treated in the emergency room.

And in 2010, four hospital employees in a Long Beach, California, hospital were fired after taking cell phone photos of a stabbing victim and posting them to Facebook, according to Fierce Health Care.

In other cases, hospitals are so zealous about patient privacy that no one is allowed to take any photos at all, including patients taking photos of family members. The Springfield News-Leader reports that in July, 2014, a woman was detained by Mercy Hospital security after she took a photo of her son and refused to delete it.

As of this post, it is not clear if the patient who was photographed in the nude by a hospital employee has been told that she was photographed.

[Image courtesy of: WRIC]