SINGAPORE – A photographer at the National Dental Centre of Singapore (NDCS) abused his position as a public healthcare worker by taking voyeuristic pictures of female patients he found attractive.
Elgin Ng, 29, who is no longer working for NDCS, took more than 600 of such photographs of 25 victims and even sent some of them to a friend.
On Nov 18, he pleaded guilty to nine charges, including multiple counts of voyeurism.
Twenty-one other charges will be considered when he is sentenced on Dec 9.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Jeremy Bin told the court that as an NDCS photographer, Ng was tasked to take pictures of the teeth and jaws of patients who were scheduled for surgery.
Court documents stated that dentists who wanted such photographs to be taken would first lodge requests on the centre’s Electronic Dental Records (EDR) system.
Ng, who was stationed in a photography room, would ask the patients to come forward after receiving the requests.
He would then take pictures of patients’ faces, primarily of their teeth and jaw.
For added modesty, he had to provide patients with a blue board to cover their chest, regardless of his or her gender.
When dealing with women and girls, Ng, who is a Singaporean, had to either have a female colleague present to assist in the photo-taking process, or keep the curtains in the room open.
After taking the pictures, he would extract the images from the camera’s SD card and transfer them to a secured hard drive owned by NDCS.
