"Even if you’d never heard of the King Edward VII Hospital before that infamous prank call, a quick look at its online brochure would have told you all about its self-belief and famous heritage.
Established more than 100 years ago, it hand-picks its consultants, claims a zero rate of hospital-acquired MRSA infections, and offers all patients well-appointed private rooms.
Of course, because the private hospital business is fiercely competitive, huge effort is exerted to recruit the best consultants and to offer a five-star service.
But for the King Edward VII in Central London, there’s no doubt that what gives it the commercial edge is not its staff or the fine meals on offer, but its peerless royal connections.
The Queen is not only patron but also a former patient — she had surgery on her knee there in 2003. In addition, the Queen Mother, Prince Philip, Prince Charles, Camilla and Sophie Wessex have all been treated there.
So when the world discovered how easy it was for Australia’s 2Day FM hoaxers to hoodwink the staff, the hospital found itself facing a major PR crisis.
All hospitals have a prime duty to protect their patients’ privacy. But when your unique selling point is that those patients include the Royal Family, a failure to guarantee that privacy becomes potentially catastrophic.
No one — not the DJ pranksters, not the hospital, not William and Kate — could possibly have predicted that the nurse who put through the call would feel so devastated she would take her own life. But it surely doesn’t require much imagination to realise that the nurses involved would have felt both personally and professionally humiliated.
Certainly that thought occurred to William and Kate. As William’s office was quick to point out: ‘We offered our full and heartfelt support to the nurses involved and hospital staff at all times.’
Even so, the hospital’s management had suffered terrible damage to its much-prized image. Despite long experience of dealing with the royals, it appears to have been unprepared for the level of attention such a high-profile patient would inevitably attract.
With what now seems to have been fatal complacency, it appears not to have occurred to anyone that it should upgrade its usual night-time telephone protocol, whereby calls to the switchboard are automatically diverted to a senior nurse on duty.
Nor, it seems, did it adequately consider just how devastated that nurse would feel when she realised the result of her action. We may in due course learn there were other factors that contributed to Indian-born Jacintha Saldanha’s fragile mental state. But at the moment it seems likely that her background and culture meant she couldn’t forgive herself for having brought shame on herself, her family and her employers.
John Lofthouse, the hospital’s chief executive, has said she was not disciplined or criticised and that ‘the hospital had been supporting her throughout this difficult time’.
However, her family are entitled to ask precisely what form that support took.
Did any senior official reassure Mrs Saldanha that her job was safe? Did any manager have the decency to tell her the fault was not hers but theirs — for failing to recognise that they should have put additional security measures in place?
According to MP Keith Vaz, who’s been in close contact with the nurse’s family, her distraught husband and children do not feel the hospital has offered them sufficient support.
The inquiry the hospital is now conducting must establish whether its efforts to reassure her were as plentiful and heartfelt as its efforts to reassure the Royal Family that such a breach of privacy would never occur again.
For the deeply disturbing feeling remains that the welfare of a ‘dedicated and caring’ nurse was not quite as high in managers’ minds as ensuring the continued patronage of its royal patients.
Without doubt, the Royal Family awaits the answers to these questions with interest. Who could blame them if they seriously considered switching hospitals?
Not because a nurse put through a hoax call. But because a hospital’s duty of care to dedicated and hard-working staff should always matter more than its public image."
