PATIENT CONFIDENTIALITY

Patient Confidentiality



Patient Confidentiality

Introduction

Caring for the privacy of the individual is often ignored by professional caregivers themselves in favor of more technical elements, while it requires care to highlight issues such as the attitude of listening, empathy and patient autonomy. If we want our citizens to benefit from a concept of health is understood as the fullness of happiness of the person, it is very important to train nurses in these and other ethical issues, the establishment of health policy that is based on the respect for autonomy and dignity and that managers and Ethics Committees of the institutions should ensure a nursing care centered care to privacy (Allen, 2008).

From the legal point of view, the law considers to privacy on three levels: a public sphere, private sphere and a sphere strictly intimate (most related to our present investigation) which enter such source data racial, sexual and religious beliefs. In the health care there are published standards on the protection of privacy: Royal Decree 994/1999, the ratification of the Oviedo Convention for the protection of human rights and human dignity with regard to the application of medicine and biology, and Law 15/1999 of 13 December on the Protection of Personal Data (Ensign, 2008).

From the point of view of nursing, some authors identify a well-defined facets within this concept: the intimacy of the physical, psychological intimacy, privacy and socio-cultural related information and confidentiality. To maintain physical intimacy should avoid undressing people indiscriminately, strictly necessary to remove clothing or find ways to make physical examinations properly and only in the presence of the professionals involved. Psychic intimacy refers to its psychological dimension, for each person being unique and being so many forms as can be experienced or attacked. Social and cultural intimacy includes how it is felt by people from other cultures, societies and minorities. Confidentiality requires intimacy in providing or managing information.

HIPAA stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act that was published in the year 1996. The act consists of HIPAA security rule and the HIPAA Privacy rule. The act covers entities such as health plans, doctors, hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes (Ross, 2002). The underlying purpose of the Act was to come up with national standards for health care transactions that take place electronically and protects employees and their families for health insurance when they leave their job (NIH, 2011a).

Patient confidentiality refers to safeguarding the personal health information of each individual. When a person comes for treatment to a doctor he puts his trust in the doctor and expects that this relationship of trust will not be breached. This is not only a legal but also an ethical duty of every healthcare professional including nurses, insurers, doctors and insurers. Patient confidentiality refers to “the disclosure of nonpublic information within a fiduciary, professional or contractual relationship.” (Majumder, 2005).

The paper discusses the HIPAA rules for patient information and assesses the positive and negative impacts of breach of patient confidentiality on patient ...