ARNEL BANAGA SALGADO
Assignment 1 of Module 5
Confidentiality and security of the information gathered from the electronic health record of the patient is very important especially with my current role as a teacher teaching students to become competent in the Psychiatric Nursing setup at the local psychiatric hospital. For now, I would like to differ from the role that I play from the instruction stated in number 1, since I am assuming the role of the teacherfor a while, my responsibility is enormous as I must make it sure that the security of information gathered from the clients are all safeguarded in any way possible i.e. from the class presentation, pre-conferences and post conferences or case presentations.
The Electronic Health Record that we are using in the hospitals contains all the necessary details of the patients including their national ID numbers, private phone numbers, the details of theparents, current employer among others. If there is a breached of confidentiality, then there would always the exposure of the client to identify thief, stigma and shame of the family if we look at the culture of the clients. To protect the client and bring awareness to the students, I always remind them about the roles that they play in their clinical posting as they carry always the orientation document that I prepared for the clinical posting in the psychiatric hospital, to quote:
“CONFIDENTIALITY. While on duty in the psychiatric ward, students are bound by the requirements of maintaining client confidentiality, which means information given by clients and their family members, the information they gathered from the physical chart and WAREED (computer record), must not be shared with anyone outside of the ward at any time. Absolutely students must not take a recording, camera or anything that may compromise the identity and anonymity of their client.”
I need to emphasize privacy, accountability, security, candor and confidentiality at all times, that is why no camera or recording is allowed. For now, no one can access the HER through our WAREED system without my consent since it requires password credentials to open it, thus there is no unauthorized access and use of patient information. My problem actually lies on the graduate and post basic students who are taking psychiatric nursing with me since they can access the patient record anywhere as long as they are given access to it. Since they are licensed nurses and working with the MOH hospitals, they have access to the ERP and there is no limit in the process of accessing it, nevertheless I always emphasize that always maintain high level of confidentiality, thus they must not access the system if they are not in the clinical posting.
To emphasize the point in item number 2 of the module assignment, i.e. how shall we protect patient-related information be observed in the social media, as a student and as a teacher, we shall never geolocate our place when we are working in the ward or share pictures and other updates such as, “feeling happy…” or with emoticons – coupled with the picture of the ward or the name of the patient. As such, there are so many high profile patients in the hospital that we need to protect, thus discussing their cases is usually discouraged like for the sake of this paper – recently, we admitted a ROYAL family member who was admitted because of substance abuse…at no time, we can use in place of his name, Mr. X, but since his name appeared in the WAREED system, I needed to instruct my students not to discuss his case anywhere other than the discussion room where we usually do pre and post conferences.