When fame and medical privacy collide: Kate and other confidentiality crises
Medical records are supposed to be sacred and reserved for the dedicated professionals who treat a patient, but the Princess of Wales is not the first to find herself at the center of accusations that they have been plundered for gossip.
Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the Leveson Inquiry into media conduct that he believed a story in the Sun about his son Fraser’s diagnosis with cystic fibrosis in 2006 could only have come from leaked medical records.
Brown, who had previously lost a daughter, said he and his wife had felt compelled to make a statement confirming the condition of their then four-month-old child after being contacted by the newspaper – and that they subsequently had received an apology from NHS Fife.
The Sun denied the story came from medical records and insisted the source was the father of another patient. Brown called this ‘fiction’.
In the US, there have been a series of public cases in which hospital employees have been punished for accessing celebrity health data, whether to satisfy their personal curiosity or to satisfy the media’s appetite for the smallest detail.
In 2008, at least thirteen employees at the UCLA medical center in Los Angeles were fired and another six suspended for… gain access to pop star Britney Spears’ records while she was being treated in the psychiatric ward.
The following year, California’s health watchdog fined Bellflower Hospital $250,000 for failing to prevent more than two dozen employees from snooping through the records of Nadya Suleman, who became known as “Octomum” after the birth of an octuplet.
In Britain, such well-publicized breaches are rare, although it is impossible to know how many public figures’ health problems have been exposed in a similar way to that of Fraser Brown, with one newspaper presenting what the former Prime Minister called a βfait accompli β mentioned. β.
Sometimes the surprise was more in the medical concerns that public figures were able to silence than in the concerns that were leaked.
Former Home Secretary David Blunkett claimed in his diaries that Tony Blair concealed the fact he had a heart condition for 15 years before being admitted to hospital in 2003 – something Downing Street denied.
When Boris Johnson contracted Covid in April 2020, he and his aides initially seemed reluctant to acknowledge the severity of his condition until he was admitted to hospital.
However, Johnson’s upbeat video messages were a model of transparency compared to the approach of some of his predecessors. Winston Churchill suffered an acute stroke in 1953 which left him incapacitated for two months, but his condition was hushed up with the support of the press β despite clear public interest in the news.
When Churchill’s personal physician, Lord Moran, published a report on the former prime minister’s illnesses in 1966, after his death, many colleagues were outraged at what they saw as a breach of trust.
Churchill’s successor, Anthony Eden, also struggled with health problems after a failed gallbladder operation. Some historians believe in the lingering complications and the medications Eden was prescribed may have been a factor in the chain of decision-making that led to the Suez crisis. Once again, the public was largely left in the dark.
The royal family has also traditionally been a fierce guardian of their medical history, although Diana broke that taboo by speaking publicly about her battle with bulimia.
Occasionally, violating the privacy of public figures can be the result of a blunder, rather than a conspiracy. The Sun reported on Sunday in 2016 that there had been medical papers relating to the king and Diana found in a filing cabinet on an industrial estate in Bridgend.
In contrast to its handling of Fraser Brown’s case, the newspaper sent a reporter to return the data to Clarence House.