Anti-social media

I KNOW the press is powerful. But wow, folks, really? The media got Kathryn Knott fired?

Color me shocked by the readers who have taken issue with "the media" for some very critical coverage of Knott, the Lansdale Hospital ER tech who posted breathtakingly degrading Tweets about her patients. In my last column, I dared to suggest that Knott wasn't worthy of her job.

Apparently, the hospital's parent company, Abington Health, thought she wasn't, either. On Thursday, they canned Knott, which one reader blames me for.

"Congratulations. She got fired. Job well done," emailed the reader, armedfreedom, who'd earlier excoriated me for not understanding the stress that prompted Knott to "vent."

"Many health-care workers . . . often vent in ways that may seem inappropriate," he/she wrote. "It comes with the territory. It is sometimes a counterbalance to the constant stream of human misery they encounter. . . . Yet you write about something you don't know."

Not so. I worked in a hospital all through college and did two other stints before landing in journalism. Two of my sisters are nurses. Another is a doctor. And I have many friends who make their living tending the sick.

What can I say? I like medical people.

The ones who do their professions proud are the ones who know the difference between venting to a co-worker, out of earshot, and tweeting public derision for an unlucky patient whose malady they find #disgusting.

Knott probably never expected her tweets to be read by anyone other than her friends. That changed when she was charged Monday with allegedly assaulting a gay couple in Center City on Sept. 11.

Way to observe a national day of mourning, right?

Everyone wanted to know who Knott was; her Twitter account offered those horrible clues; and - boom - hello, unemployment.

Knott's employer did the right thing. Not just because her patients deserved to have their dignity protected. But because her tweets made Lansdale Hospital look awful. Who in their right mind would use the place if they thought their condition would be publicly derided, as Knott did in a cruel tweet about a patient's hemorrhoids?

But even less-obvious social-media posts have gotten medical workers booted.

In July, ER nurse Katie Duke was fired from New York-Presbyterian Hospital after she posted on Instagram a snapshot of an empty trauma room littered with soiled medical supplies used to treat a man who'd been hit by a subway train. Duke's caption: "Man vs. 6 train."

Duke - at the time one of the stars of ABC's reality show "New York Med"- didn't name the patient, describe his injuries or mention whether he had lived or died. But her seven-year career at the hospital was terminated anyway. Not for violating HIPAA laws, she told the New York Post, but for being "insensitive."

The brave new world of social media, of course, has so, so health care on its head. Hospitals that have always been very careful about the conditions under which they'd allow traditional media through their doors - print reporters, news broadcasters and the like - often don't know how to control the media that's already inside their walls: their own staff.

"All the employees have cameras in their cellphones," says a media consultant I spoke with who prefers to stay anonymous because his firm works with high-profile health-care clients. "They're on Facebook and Twitter. They have blogs. On the one hand, the hospital wants them to use social media to promote the hospital's programs and services, but not every employee has the same judgment about how to do that."

So gaffes occur. But a gaffe at one medical center might be an acceptably edgy promo at another. Nationwide, says the consultant, "The policies are all over the place."

And what offends one privacy-exposed patient might not offend another.

The dilemma reminds me of how former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart characterized pornography back in 1964. "I know it when I see it," he said, as he struggled to define precisely what made some images obscene and others not.

In Knott's case, her employer wisely decided that they knew inappropriate tweets when they saw them. And good for them.

So, attention all health-care workers: Keep your judgments about your patients and photos of their busted parts to yourself - or at least off social media. Better yet, leave your tempting phone at home. If anyone asks later how your day went, tell him, "Fine - just fine," even if your hair is caked with someone else's gore.

Maybe even say a prayer of thanks that you're in better shape than the poor soul whose gore you're wearing.

Phone: 215-854-2217

On Twitter: @RonniePhilly

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