Disturbing photos of NICU baby posted on nurse Sierra Samuels’ social media

Miami, Florida – Pictures of a baby born with a birth defect was posted on a Jackson Memorial Hospital employee’s social media account.
According to Jackson Health System, they are dealing with a disturbing invasion of privacy issue, and the employee is now on administrative leave.
“In addition to the general HIPPA violation that we’d be looking at here there’s a sense of decency about the rights and expectations we all have in our likenesses and our images,” said Miami litigation attorney David Weinstein.
The posts were made on an account belonging to the name Sierra Samuels, a nurse at JMH.
Without respect for the baby and the baby’s family, Samuels shared photos with the following captions:
“My night was going great then boom!”, “Your intestines posed (sic) to be inside not outside baby” and is followed up with “#gastroschisis.”
Gastroschisis is a birth defect of the belly where the baby’s intestines are exposed.
According to Jackson Health System, all of its employees go through privacy policy training on a regular basis, and any potential privacy breach is taken seriously.
A statement from a Jackson Health System representative read, in part, “Employees who violate these privacy rules, despite being educated, are subject to disciplinary action including suspension or termination. As soon as we learned of this potential breach, we immediately placed this employee under administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation.”
There is a certain expectation of privacy if you’re in a private area, especially in a hospital, Weinstein said.
“With images, you have a certain expectation of privacy that if you’re in an area that you’re in an area that you believe to be private and in this case a hospital, even more so,” he said.