A government hospital in northern Phitsanulok province issued public apology last night after a video showing one of their nurses manhandling an elderly patient in the intensive care unit went viral.
Around 8pm, Buddhachinaraj Phitsanulok Hospital, held a press conference to address the heavily criticized clip depicting their staff member’s rough treatment.
Dr. Visith Sathienwantanee, the hospital’s deputy director, issued a public apology to the 90-year-old male patient, who is being treated at the hospital for emphysema.
“Right now, what we want to tell the public is that we’re not neglecting the incident, and we’d like to apologize for it. We’ll investigate what really happened and will find the proper measures to handle it,” he said.
The disturbing video, which has received over eight million views since it was posted yesterday, shows an unidentified nurse harshly manhandling an evidently weak patient lying on a hospital bed. She throws a pillow at the elderly man before roughly dragging his bed towards her and shoving the pillow behind his head.
(Warning: Video may be disturbing to some viewers)
Pawarana Ketpan, a woman who witnessed the incident while she was at the hospital, posted the footage on her Facebook page, demanding that the public see it.
“Is this what the code of conduct for nurses tell them to do? Or it’s just this one particular individual?” Pawarana wrote.
“My father was once extremely sick, but my mother was always there with him at the hospital. But if she hadn’t been, would he have been treated like this too?”
“Did she really think no one would see this?”
The hospital has yet to determine what actions they will take, reasoning that they want to “investigate the matter further in order to determine the most appropriate course of action.”
Visith said that the establishment of a disciplinary board may be necessary.
Meanwhile, the nurse in question, whose name the hospital has withheld, has been transferred to perform “other duties that don’t require interactions with patients.”
Which, if we may quote Nursing World, goes against the very definition of a nurse — whom, in theory, should act as a “glue that holds a patient’s health care journey together.”
In response to the hospital’s apology, some netizens are demanding the nurse be fired once and for all.
