Can posting pictures on Facebook get you arrested?  It can if you are a nurse and if the photo is of one of your patients.  If I was a registered nurse (and as you can probably guess, I am not),  I would like to think that I would be a caring, selfless individual who was focused on one thing and one thing only…taking care of my patients to the best of my ability and nursing them back to health.  The last thing on my list of things to do would be to photograph the “buttocks” of one of my sick patients and then posting the pictures on Facebook.  While it only seems like common sense to not post a photo of someone without permission, yet alone a photo of their backside without permission, not everyone is blessed with an IQ over 20.  Unfortunately, in Portland, Oregon, one particular nurse felt the need to do exactly that…photograph a patient’s buttocks and place the photos on Facebook.  She was arrested a few days later and since there are no commercial bail bonds in Oregon, she was probably assigned a cash bond instead.  She was ultimately sentenced to 8 days in jail, banned from using all social media sites (yah right), put into a national database prohibiting her from getting a nursing license and ordered to write a 1,000 word apology letter to the victim.  The kicker is that the patient sadly passed away recently and will never see the letter. 

So the next time you are in the hospital, make sure the back of your gown is closed all the way, because you never know when the “hospital paparazzi” might be snapping your photo and putting it online.

Original story: Portland nursing assistant sent to jail after posting dying patient’s buttocks on Facebook, New York Daily News.