In what purports to be at the least an extract from the transcript of the making of the hoax call, in its second line as it appears in Dr Scutt's article, appear the words "..., pretending to be the Queen, ...".

Can it be clarified as to whether these words are part of the actual transcript, or have been inserted by the article author?

The reason I ask is because the highlighted text link 'transcript' in the article's fifth paragraph is currently yielding a '404 message' when clicked upon. Cate, Duchess of Cambridge, could be presumed to have two grandmothers, one paternal, and one maternal, respectively. HM the Queen is not Cate's grandmother.

Could it have been presumed that it was either of these two persons making the call at the time (5:30AM GMT) when the call was put through from the reception switchboard to the nurse who subsequently answered questions?

Its well beyond time that these so called shock jocks who masquerade as radio announcers and who, day after day,foul up the air waves with their inane utterings were brought into gear.
They appear to believe they can say what they like about almost anyone.
Shut them down!

was it not true that this poor girl had made previous attempts on her life. If so should not those factors be looked at more closely rather than the actions of loud mouth self centred radio announcers.

The two gross idiots assumed much and the poor girl was never informed of their 'prank'.

That caused her death.

Those two fools should never be allowed to do other than menial work for the rest of their lives.

The silence of the hospital is deafening, and hopefully this will change after the March inquest. They must have had a security process in place, but at the 5am point of a night shift endured by a woman living away from family all week, and previously diagnosed as depressed, with a medical suggestion that she not be left alone - well.
Compounded by the 2nd upstairs nurse, of whom, strangely, we have heard no name, no plea or opinion.
Such a costly hospital would have calls from POSH accents all the time - half the surgical staff would sound like any HRH and both nurses would know posh from tosh in a second, and, at no time did Mel say she was 'the Queen'. In my opinion, the radio station announcers have a case for getting an apology from the baying and ill-informed public lynch mob.

The article author's seemingly pivotal fourth paragraph appears, at least on the face of it, to have excluded one of the 'principal suspects' in relation to her suggestion as to the exercise of 'pernicious authority' having played any part in the setting in place of this hoax: Charles, Prince of Wales.

Dr Scutt goes on to say, in the fifth paragraph:

"This all poses the question as to whether those
at the forefront of the criticism (leading it and
adding to it) heard the exchanges making up the call
from Sydney radio station to London hospital, or
read the transcript. The transcript is readily available,
published with medical details omitted: ..."

The transcript may very well have been readily available when the article was written, but it is not so obviously so now. The author's own link to it continues, as at posting, to yield a '404 Notice - Server not found'. I suspect, in the absence of any correction by the author, that at the time of submission of the article that link did in fact work, and that the explanatory words "Mel Greig, pretending to be the Queen:" were those of the transcript, not Jocelynne Scutt.

So on the one hand we have the 'journalism' taking care to establish that the hoaxers were all along intending to impersonate HM and Prince Charles, but in the actual words reportedly used by the hoaxers a display of very carefully chosen language that would preserve them from any charge of such impersonation that might subsequently be laid. A display of the sort of foresight and precision of expression one might expect from trained legal professionals, not light-weight disc jockeys.

I think the author may have been mistaken in using the word 'or' in the article title. I think the whole affair positively reeks of being a carefully (or perhaps, in the end, not so carefully) controlled media set-up. See: http://noplaceforsheep.com/2012/12/13/the-hospital-and-the-radio-station-when-management-fails-who-pays-the-price/#comment-59403

and, following: http://noplaceforsheep.com/2012/12/13/the-hospital-and-the-radio-station-when-management-fails-who-pays-the-price/#comment-60512

The exercise of pernicious authority is another matter altogether, perhaps not by whom the author thinks.

Dr Scutt's sixth paragraph notes the immediacy with which a call purporting to be from a family member (a person claiming to be a grandmother of a patient called Cate) is put through from a reception switchboard to a to this day unidentified second nurse in the hospital ward. Dr Scutt goes on to emphasise the expectation of realism amongst any audience hearing the record of the hoax call or reading a transcript of it, in paragraphs seven through 13.

At this point, in remarking upon the seeming absence of call-handling protocols being in place at the hospital, she seems to ignore a most basic aspect of the reality surrounding the event, the time difference between Australia, from where the call originated, and London, where the hospital was located. The hoax call was received at around 5:30AM GMT!

It is not hard to imagine that at that hour the reception switchboard may not have been attended by staff trained in the protocols of handling enquiries. The record claims that it was a nurse, Jacintha Saldanha, who put the call through to the ward, from where the second, unidentified, nurse passed on information as to the condition of Cate, Duchess of Cambridge, to the hoaxers. The circumstance of the time of day alone would provide a substantial explanation for the apparent absence of call-handling protocols by non-reception (ie. night shift nursing) staff.

In the light of hindsight, it may be thought that with such prominent persons admitted as patients it may have been more prudent to have had the reception switchboard manned 24/7. Such has been the drip-feed of relevant information from the MSM in this case that the public does not even know what, if any, instructions had been given to nursing staff as to the taking of phone calls. It is not even clear as to whether the shift was nurse Saldanha's regular one, or one upon which she was standing-in for someone else perhaps more familiar with procedures for that hour at short notice. There had been problems.

A 'hoax' call concerning a patient recently admitted to hospital is on a par with a 'hoax' call to 000 emergency services. Does anyone anywhere wonder why such public nuisance calls are rare?

What sort of person would do it? Why? Was the opportunity to embarrass the Royals, so jealously hated by some, so enticing that it was 'game on' regardless?

There is no excusing the arrogant, insensitive decision makers and participants in this 'hoax'. That something else went wrong was on the cards. That is not to blame for a particular tragedy, but it does confirm that 'tricking' hospitals and emergency agencies who deal with events involving personal tragedy and personal harm is fraught with risk.

Of course hospitals, helping services and emergency agencies will always be susceptible to abuse by public nuisances. It is not adequate to argue that they have some contributory responsibility or could have prevented the perpetrators from committing the offence. Since when is a victim responsible for a crime or nuisance committed against them? It is outrageous that anyone would seek to excuse and defend this sorry incident.

Dr Scutt, in her justifiable pursuit of realism in divining the reasons explaining why the hoax call elicited the response it did, can be forgiven for not mentioning the role that the time of day (5:30AM) at receipt of the call may have played, should she have been unaware as to it, given the absolutely appallingly sketchy (and frequently contradictory) reporting as to the hoax, as is referenced in her article title.

As her article stands in isolation, she draws a long bow in seeking to connect the 'royalty trumps protocol' explanation of the hoax' success to inferences as to erstwhile concealment of the extent of exercise of Royal prerogatives with respect to the grant of assent to proposed legislation within the UK. Her highlighted text link 'extent of senior royals veto' in the 18th paragraph delivers the viewer, via one of those off-putting extensive tract-like web pages, to a news item that appeared in the UK Guardian newspaper - the item appears around one sixth of the way down the scroll bar of that rather long web page screen display. (Here is a direct link for the reader's convenience: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jan/14/secret-papers-royals-veto-bills )

A recent tweet by Australian lawyer (and OLO author) Greg Barns, however, also serves to spotlight the possible relationship of the exercise of Royal authority in matters tangential to what, on Twitter, had become known as the '#royalprank'. Greg tweeted this link, http://t.co/7jayxftH , to a SMH news item that announced that there would be no charges laid by the UK Crown Prosecution Service with respect to the hoax. Barns alleged in his tweet that involvement of Buckingham Palace had been behind the reference of the case to the CPS in the first case. Viewers can see the Twitter conversation here: http://noplaceforsheep.com/2012/12/13/the-hospital-and-the-radio-station-when-management-fails-who-pays-the-price/#comment-62594

The UK CPS was quoted as saying "However misguided, the telephone call was intended as a harmless prank.", and that "... any potential prosecution would not be in the public interest".

Some very strange circumstances came to light following the discovery of the death of nurse Jacintha Saldanha, however. Another blogger's view: http://bwican.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/casualty-ward-off.html#!/2012/12/casualty-ward-off.html

As it happened, I observed the reaction on Twitter to the breaking news of the discovery of nurse Saldanha's death in real time, and posted upon it in a now-archived OLO General Discussion topic, here: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=5530#150676

One of the strange circumstances referred to in my preceeding post was that the Twitter accounts of the two DJs were closed within minutes of the news breaking as to the nurse's death, but that recordings of the making of the prank call continued to be rebroadcasted by 2DayFM. That circumstance is evidenced by a Twitter conversation embedded in this post on another blog: http://noplaceforsheep.com/2012/12/13/the-hospital-and-the-radio-station-when-management-fails-who-pays-the-price/#comment-59643

The timestamps in that Twitter conversation are showing the time and date in London, 4:14PM Friday 7 December 2012. In Australia, 11 hours ahead of GMT at this time of year, where the closure of the Twitter accounts of the DJs was presumably effected, it was 3:14AM on Saturday 8 December 2012. It would be very interesting to know whether the DJs were awake at that hour on the weekend to delete their Twitter accounts themselves, or whether someone in '@2DayFMSydney' management monitoring developments, and having the passwords, deleted the accounts. I think the latter is most likely.

Such Twitter reaction as there was was less spontaneous than it was MSM-driven, and directed to @2DayFMSydney and the Twitter hashtag conversation '#royalprank' once it became established. Reaction may have been considered large by Australian standards, but it largely came from Europe, then North America, where the news broke on the morning of Friday 7 December, as witnessed by the timestamps on the majority of tweets.

Consider what may be revealed, however, by this sequence of (embedded) Twitter conversations:

http://noplaceforsheep.com/2012/12/13/the-hospital-and-the-radio-station-when-management-fails-who-pays-the-price/#comment-59385

http://noplaceforsheep.com/2012/12/13/the-hospital-and-the-radio-station-when-management-fails-who-pays-the-price/#comment-59403

http://noplaceforsheep.com/2012/12/13/the-hospital-and-the-radio-station-when-management-fails-who-pays-the-price/#comment-60512

Was the Daily Mail, in posting what turned out to be its INDIAN online edition WITHOUT any comments just after the initial comment removal, trying to disguise the fact that the target of its comment-removal exercise was JUST ONE COMMENT to its UK edition that told all, or certainly told far too much, as to the whole prank FROM THE VERY BEGINNING perhaps being a largely UK-media inspired event?