Prime Time tonight; investigative journalism or fishing for a drama?

It’s pretty unnerving to see yourself on film when you didn’t realise someone was filming you. Which is why several nurses, doctors and administrators are going to be a tad distracted, all day today, by the expectation that tonight, RTÉ’s Prime Time Investigates may show footage surreptitiously filmed in the A&E units of three or four hospitals.

From RTÉ’s point of view, it’s an opportunity to show pictures of the reality that’s been talked about on one radio programme after another. An opportunity to present in human terms an emotive issue often discussed in structural or resource terms. An opportunity to show the real suffering of real human beings as opposed to staging yet another discussion about trolleys, step-down facilities or transit units. An opportunity to do real front-line investigative journalism under cover.

From the hospitals’ point of view, it’s a nightmare and an outrage to find that on several days in March, cameras were sneaking around their Casualty wards. Hospital managements’ view the activity as infringing patients’ privacy and confidentiality, as amounting to trespass and as constituting fraud, since the camera operators had to miss-represent themselves and their purpose by letting on to be sick or by letting on to be related to patients being treated.