Discussion

Purpose

The purpose of this discussion is for you to investigate healthcare privacy breaches and the associated risks and the ethical and legal issues confronted as a DNP-prepared nurse. Privacy breaches are serious offenses that negatively affect the trust between nurses and patients. To maintain this trust, nurses must maintain the privacy and security of patient information.

Instructions

Reflect on the following scenarios related to the protection of health information. Select two of the scenarios to discuss.

·    Scenario 1: A staff nurse posted the following comment on her social media page: “Can this shift be any longer? It started out with a waiting room full of nagging people who don’t seem to know what ‘emergency’ means. Then, I had to deal with the drama of trying to transfer a 400 lbs. (no joke) intubated chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patient down the hall to the intensive care unit. Those intensive care unit nurses are such divas, and I wasn’t in the mood for their whining. Someone help!”

oAnalyze the privacy and security issues related to this social media posting.

·    Scenario 2: A nurse practitioner is preparing a presentation poster for an infectious disease conference. She includes pictures of varying stages of a client’s lesions in the poster.

oAnalyze the privacy and security issues related to the inclusion of patient information on the poster.

·    Scenario 3: A clinical instructor is working with nursing students on a medical unit for the day. While rounding to check on students, the instructor discovers a patient’s daughter wants to take a picture of the nursing student and the patient together to post on social media.

oAnalyze the privacy and security issues and explain the best response for the clinical instructor.

Please click on the following link to review the DNP Discussion Guidelines on the Student Resource Center program page:

·    Link (webpage): Graduate Discussion Grading Guidelines and Rubric (Links to an external site.)

Solution:

Scenario 1:

Balancing social media and patient privacy is of paramount importance in nursing. Health care professionals ought to be keen when using social media to avoid the issue of violating the patients’ protected health information (PHI).   Some of the information that is considered PHI includes demographic information, test and laboratory results, mental health conditions, medical histories as well as insurance information (Drolet et al., 2017). However, other information must be combined with others to identify a person.  In this case, the nurse’s action may not rise to the level of a HIPAA violation because there is no specific HPI that directly identifies the patient………..