Nurses Playing Facebook Game (Farmville) Instead of Attending to Patients

Yes, I personally find it too absurd. Shouldn’t nurses be attending to patients instead of indulging in online social activities such as maintaining their Facebook profiles, tweeting or chatting with friends on MSN? What do you think?

Well, anyway, this photo was grabbed from Stomp, a Singapore-based web portal and taken in the National University Hospital, Singapore. According to the photographer (although the quality of the photos aren’t good), “I was visiting my dad at the hospital when I saw these nurses playing a Facebook game on the computer.”

“A few nurses of ward 57 were sitting at the Nurse Station and using a computer to access a Facebook game called Farmville. This is so unprofessional. Instead of attending to the patients, they were playing computer games. Moreover, there were still visitors there.”

In recent years, there has been a heated debate of whether or not employers should restrict employees from accessing to social networking websites while at work. According to a study by information security consultancy Global Secure Systems and the organizers of the Infosecurity Europe trade show, the use of such sites is costing U.K. business an estimated $12.5 billion per year in terms of reduced output. Another study showed that employees spend at least 30 minutes a day visiting these sites with some employees spending up to three hours of their working day taking care of their online profile.

Besides imposing a limit on the amount of time employees spend on social websites, some bosses have resorted to more extreme measures. For example, block all Internet connectivity, restrict access to certain websites or ban the use of mobile devices, lest workers may still surf Facebook on their iPhones.