In a disturbing trend that is now cropping up on the internet, nurses and medical practitioners are posting selfies of themselves with dying patients on social media, drawing outrage from netizens. The latest such selfie has seen a Russian nurse come under investigation after posting pictures of herself with some of her dying patients, mocking them, and revealing that they 'tie them to beds'.

This latest incident highlights an increasingly depraved trend of medical staff in countries such as Russia and Ukraine using social media platforms to abuse the sick, vulnerable, and elderly patients that they are supposed to be caring for.

The nurse in the spotlight this time around is Russian nurse Anna Kim, who described those patients under her care who required diapers as 'filthy and disgusting.' She is also said to have used social media to comment on the standard of care given to patients at these hospitals, alleging that doctors at her hospital in Sakhalin 'only help people they want to help.'

Regarding the apathy of the doctors, she wrote: "If they don't want to help, you are doomed. They don't give a s***. Patients may have extremely low blood pressure, and doctors don't use defibrillators." And despite these ill-advised and poorly thought out posts and outbursts, she has reportedly neither been sacked nor disciplined.

Her list of infractions is a lengthy one. One of her posts captures her posing with an elderly woman patient who was 'gravely ill' and fighting for her life. The accompanying caption read: "Some patients might go out of their minds... we tie them to beds. But it's okay, this is life."

Kim works at the Sakhalin Regional Clinical Hospital, with a senior medic who commented on the incident saying: "Such violation of ethical norms showed that the person who did this requires professional psychiatric help." Some claims even suggested she may have been 'drunk on duty' when the pictures were taken, putting serious question marks on her ethics.

Regarding the case, a local health ministry spokesman said: "An internal investigation has been carried out into the unacceptable, unethical behavior of a nurse…."

Local health minister Alexey Pak similarly condemned the behavior. He said: "Helpless people on life support devices became victims of her unceremonious filming. Dozens of professionals work to bring these patients back to active life, monitoring their health 24/7 and being ready to give any emergency treatment."

As the trend seems to grow unabashedly in Russia's medical care system, one that President Vladimir Putin has identified as a key priority moving forward, it is highlighting the privacy flaws, as well as the ease at which the system can be abused in the country.

Kim's example is unfortunately just one of many. One of the posts on social media shows a male gynecologist in Syktyvkar, the capital city of the Komi Republic region, posing with a female patient during what appeared to be an intimate examination or medical procedure.

Similarly, in Kazan, a city in southwest Russia, 20-year-old nurse Gulnaz Yalalova was pictured posing for the camera while holding the removed spleen of a patient following an operational procedure. She would go then insensitively post that particular image alongside one of her in a bikini and was promptly rebuked for her immaturity.

Another such incident took place in the small town of Alexandrov, which has a population of just over 60,000. Two nurses, later identified as Tatiana Katayeva and Marina Shibanova, were posing for pictures while throwing hoops over the legs of an unconscious woman patient. The same pair were later pictured holding blood bags given to their hospitals by donors, and then untastefully pretending to drink it.

After the pair was then caught fooling around in a hospital staircase, they explained their behavior by saying that: "It was all for a joke so that our profession doesn’t look so sad. We work in intensive care… we wanted to show that medical personnel haven’t lost their sense of humor and that they can behave like humans." Despite all these incidences, they were only given an official warning and still allowed to continue their jobs.

One of the incidents that attracted more attention involved a hospital in Demidovskaya hospital in Nizhny Tagil. A nurse can be seen posing alongside a surgeon just moments after they put a helpless patient under an anesthetic in preparation for surgery. Despite the outrage it caused, they still managed to hold on to their jobs.

However, most of these pale in comparison to the perverseness of one Dr. Edgar Kaminskyi from Ukraine. 32-years-old and married, he has been dubbed Dr. Selfsky for his propensity to pose for selfie-style video clips showing the naked breasts of women patients minutes after he had done a boob job operations on them.

Or another such example would be that of a 22-year-old medical student in Perm. Supposedly the daughter of the hospital chief, she posed with her colleague seconds after a breast implant surgery. A fresh cut can even be seen on the patient after the implants were put in.