Excerpt by Case Study:
Taking pictures to document the injuries the fact that patient inflicted on very little could be a affordable step in the provision of medical care. The person was struggling to consent because of self-inflicted injuries, and there is too few information to be aware of whether wait in taking pictures could have had an undesirable medical final result for the individual. Therefore , taking the pictures may not be a breach.
However , it appears equally obvious that posting the pictures would be a violation. The Privacy Regulation dictates minimal access, meaning that access to a patient’s exclusive health information needs to be limited to because few people as necessary to administer treatment. There would not seem to be a medical basis for the physician to show the 15 persons the pictures in the suicide sufferer. Therefore , I believe that the person’s confidentiality was violated. Nevertheless , if the selection of 15 persons happened to be doctors and personnel in the hospital’s psychiatric ward, I might need to revisit that conclusion.
A lot more difficult issue is the way i would manage the situation. Beneath HIPAA, a nurse may be penalized for violating a patient’s confidentiality, but you cannot find any mandatory work to statement a breach (Stewart, 2012. Therefore , We would not be violating virtually any laws by failing to report the violation. Actually because I would need to discharge confidential sufferer information into a reporting firm to statement the violation, I might really be violating the Privacy Regulation to do so. Furthermore, while I may want to tell the patient about the violation, the individual is obviously in a express of fragile mental health. I would concern yourself that these kinds of a revelation could have a negative effect on the patient’s health. Consequently , I believe that the appropriate response would be to talk about the occurrence with the doctor manager and someone inside the hospital’s administration in order to figure out what could be completed prevent the physician from posting these photos with other people.
References
Stewart, M. (2012). What nursing staff need to know about HIPPA. Recovered December 15, 2012
via Motlow College Nursing web page: www.mscc.edu/nursing/hippa.ppt
U. S. Section of Health insurance and Human Providers. (2012). Brief summary of the HIPAA Privacy Regulation.
Retrieved Dec 10, 2012 from HHS. gov website: http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/summary/index.html
