Patient Confidentiality

As a nurse, I hear the words patient confidentiality and patient privacy on a regular basis. These are not just words, these are standards and laws that help protect a person’s medical information from being disclosed to multiple people or entities that have no right to know this personal information. For this discussion board, I will be providing a distinction between patient confidentiality and patient privacy, introduce the discussion board example from the case presentation by Burkhart and Nathaniel, and provide answers to the follow-up questions asked by the authors.

Patient confidentiality and privacy go hand in hand. Confidentiality is defined as the ethical duty of all medical professionals, that have access to a patient’s private

Even though it is the duty of every nurse to keep patient confidentiality, there are times when the responsibility to protect and prevent harm outweighs the duty to keep patient privacy. The Case Presentation in the book by Burkhardt and Nathaniel (2007), uses the example of Lora, a seventeen-year-old girl, who comes into a family planning clinic for a prescription of birth control. Through the physical assessment, the nurse practitioner finds signs of physical abuse including a traumatic perforated ear drum. The young patient admits to being physically abused by her father who she currently lives with. Further conversation leads to Lora telling the nurse practitioner that she used to live with her stepfather who was sexually assaulting her. Lora feared that if anyone knew about the physical abuse from her biological father, she would be forced to move back in with her mother and stepfather and face sexual abuse once again. She asks the nurse not to tell anyone and to keep what she shared with the medical professional confident between just

The Ohio Revised Code section 2151.421 (2016) states that any medical professional, including the registered nurse and nurse practitioner, must immediately report to the public children services agency any reasonable suspicions of physical or mental injury that indicates abuse or neglect of a minor child. A minor child is defined as under eighteen years of age at the time of discovery (Reporting child abuse or neglect, 2016). Reporting abuse does not differ in the state of Ohio if Lora was fourteen or eighteen years old, all abuse must be reported if the child is under eighteen years of