14 DAY TRIAL // Whenever a celebrity is admitted to a hospital for one reason or another, it’s to be expected that someone curious or desperate enough be snooping about medical records for all the juicy details. It happened to Britney Spears, George Clooney, Sarah Fawcett, and now, according to the New York Daily News, to OctoMom Nadya Suleman.
A spokesperson for the Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center has confirmed that Suleman’s medical records have been seen by unauthorized personnel, according to the same media outlet. Of those who gained access to the files, 15 were fired on the spot and other 8 were reprimanded, but in what manner exactly is not yet known.
A warning for all the other employees who might be tempted to look at the classified medical records of Nadya Suleman has also been issued, the same spokesperson has announced.
“Despite the notoriety of this case, to us this person is a patient who deserves the privacy that all our patients get.” Jim Anderson said, as quoted by the aforementioned media outlet. At the same time, he mentioned that, from then on, the only persons who would be seeing Suleman’s files would be those who had medical reasons to do so. Anderson would not say how the eight employees were just reprimanded, but mentioned that the punishments were “significant.”
At the same time, Anderson refrained from disclosing how the breach had occurred, or the kind of files that had been accessed. Speculation has it, though, that most of those who had peeked at the records were simply looking to see who the father of the octuplets was, a thing they could not learn for the mere reason that his name had not been put on any paper. Moreover, it has been said, none of these hospital employees had yet managed to speak to the media on their findings at the time their deed was discovered.
“Even though no one knew she was there, they knew she was going to have a lot of babies. The extra monitoring helped determine that there were people who looked at the records who did not have reason to do so.” Anderson concluded by saying, as to how the breach became known.