Medical Blog Closed Down by Request of Employer

Rich Churcher is a pediatric ICU nurse in New Zealand and his blog GeekNurse was telling "the truth about nurses and nursing, for people who thought they knew."

Not anymore, it seems.

"Owing to concerns raised by staff and management, GeekNurse's archive has been removed from public display."

Just a few weeks ago, the blog hosted Grand Rounds (a weekly summary of the best posts in the medical blogosphere) and was featured on Medscape.

This development is unfortunate, to say the least.

In today's world, it makes sense for all employers to have a blogging policy which clearly states what the employees can and cannot write on blogs.

IBM's blogging guidelines are a good start and can be adapted to fit the specific needs of different employers.

KraftyLibrarian questioned recently if any hospitals had blogging policy.

I am not aware of any official blogging policy by a health organization but given the fact that a blog is created every minute, it is about time all hospitals had one.

There is already an example of a doctor who blogs against the hospital he works for. This is aside from the "natural-born ranters", as GruntDocs calls them -- the blog he found is well-written but I'm not sure how the name Fingers And Tubes In Every Orifice sounds to the prospective patients...


Bottom line:

Blogging is good but it would be nice to have some ground rules in this game which is still very new.


Update 3/28/06:

Enoch Choi points out that Geek Nurse's blog is still available in Google cache - "once on the web, always on the web" - at least until the new update of the cache.

For archiving purposes, the 2:25 edition of Grand Rounds is saved on Writely.


References:
Simply Fired - How NOT to Blog About Your Job. Especially If You Are a Doctor
Farewell, Geek Nurse
Doctor's blog takes on Indiana medical establishment. The Courier-Journal, March 6, 2006. Link via KevinMD.
Image source: GrundDoc.com