Rica Peralejo apologizes to nurses after St. Luke’s incident

SCREENGRAB from Rica Peralejo’s blog

Actress-host Rica Peralejo has apologized to nurses of St. Luke’s Medical Center at Bonifacio Global City in Taguig city for calling them “unprofessional and insensitive” after they had insisted on taking photos with her despite her ill condition.

In a blog post on Thursday, Peralejo said her friends who work at St. Luke’s and a representative from the hospital’s patient relations division told her that the medical personnel who wanted to take pictures and selfies with her were not nurses but probably medical secretaries hired by doctors at the Medical Arts Building and “not part of the hospital staff.”

“Forgive [me for] my ignorance for calling medical secretaries nurses in a post stating my discontent with St. Luke’s. I really did not mean to get at you, but more [of] the hospital for policies that allow such but I see that it has gotten out of hand,” Peralejo said.

“Intention aside, I accept this was a consequence of an action I could have thought about thrice or four times even before doing. Some of you were right. I should have immediately clarified those were not nurses and I was not able to do that,” she added.

Peralejo on Wednesday took to social media her expression of disappointment over “unprofessional nurses and staff” of St. Luke’s. In her blog entry, she elaborated that three women wearing St. Luke’s official scrubs and two other people in civilian attire insisted on taking solo pictures with her despite her request to have just one group photo.

READ: Why Rica Peralejo called hospital nurse, staff ‘unprofessional’

However, Peralejo maintained that what the “medical secretaries” did was insensitive, saying that celebrities like her also deserve privacy even in public places.

“The other thing was that I felt bad because, hello, I am not even that famous and they would do that to me, so what more if they [saw Bea Alonzo] or Kim Chiu, right?” Peralejo said.

But Peralejo admitted that her social media post was “the worst way to address” the incident.

She also blamed the media for getting “a thousand rants” from enraged netizens on Instagram, including “laos, walang awa, maarte, tanga and mayabang (has-been, merciless, picky, dumb and cocky).”

“I don’t hate nurse and never expressed that. The media and some narrow-minded followers did that, not me,” she said. “To the media, please make accurate headlines… If you also want to know why I did not do this (apology) right away is because I really didn’t think the nurses were mad at me because of my post but more like the headlines.” YG/RAM