Introduction
Healthcare providers are obliged to respect all the health privacy and confidentiality rules by ensuring sharing and handling of healthcare information in a manner that protects patient’s privacy (Murphy et al., 2011). The scenario below illustrates a situation involving breach of healthcare privacy.
Scenario
MN is a 36-year old female whose chief complaint was a lump in her breast. Her genetic screening results are positive for BRCA mutations-something that suggests a huge possibility of breast cancer. On the other hand, JN is a nurse charged with the role of providing patient teaching on breast cancer prevention and management. The nurse has possession of clinical documents outlining the genetic test results for the patient and a social health worker who has been working closely with the patient’s family is curious to know the results in order to help MN’s family members with regard to mapping their genetic predisposition to cancer and if need be, seek proactive interventions. JN refuses to share this information since it is considered private and confidential and test results should not be shared without the patient’s permission. Nonetheless, after finishing engagements with MN, the nurse disposes the papers bearing the test results in a nearby bin. The social worker reads the results and proceeds to share this information with MN’s family members-something that got MN enraged.
Analytically, this scenario shows both correct and inappropriate handling of patient information. For instance, JN refuses to share the test results with the social health worker and this is quite in line with the privacy rules. Nonetheless, when disposing all clinical documents bearing health information, it is important to shred the documents so that the information cannot be retrieved by other parties. As such, failure to shred the clinical notes was failure by the nurse.
There are various ramifications that come with this malpractice for both the social health worker and the nurse and most possibly a legal suit may be pursued by the patient (Martino & Ahuja, 2010).
References
Murphy, S. N., Gainer, V., Mendis, M., Churchill, S., & Kohane, I. (2011). Strategies for maintaining patient privacy in i2b2. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 18(Supplement 1), i103-i108.
Martino, L., & Ahuja, S. (2010, November). Privacy policies of personal health records: an evaluation of their effectiveness in protecting patient information. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM International Health Informatics Symposium (pp. 191-200). ACM.
