Nursing Case Study

Nursing is a noble profession where nurses are the front line carer of the patient. To provide competent patient care, nurses use their critical thinking skills in making a decision. In their professional practice, nurses and nursing students have the responsibility to comply with the guidelines provided by NMBA (Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia). The given case study deals with the responsibility and accountability of nurses and nursing students regarding privacy and confidentiality.

According to Nurses Standard of Practice, nurses use a range of thinking strategies to provide quality nursing care and patient safety. Firstly, as a critical thinking nurse, they collect evidence through assessment, subjective and objective assessment,

Therefore, nurses are expected to comply with legislation, policies, standards, and guidelines that will guide nurses to follow both legal and ethical duties. One of the ethical and legal obligations of a registered nurse and student nurse is to protect the privacy and confidentiality of patients (NMBA, 2013, p.6). Similarly, code of ethics for nurses has also outlined this nursing responsibility in their value statement 7 (NMBA, 2008, p.3). For example, Butts (2013), explained that the nurses can maintain physical privacy by draping the patient's body while providing care. Likewise, nurse and patient should discuss in a private room to maintain auditory privacy. Another duty of nurses is to keep the patient information confidential. This information can be either in written, oral or in electronic form. Other members of health team, like doctors who are directly involved in the patient care, can have access to patient data. Nurses cannot disclose the patient's information to patient's families, friends or third party without patient consent. However, if a patient's right and safety are jeopardized, then to protect patient, the confidential information can be disclosed. But when a nurse acts outside the code of professional conduct a nurse is held accountable by law. Therefore, in order to protect nurses and nursing students from ethical issues,

Registered nurse (Gemma) received a call from the patient's wife (Lucinda) to ask her about her husband's condition and ongoing treatment details, like patient (Salvatore) treatment details, just to find further information about her husband's diagnosis on the internet. There is a breach of a patient's privacy and confidentiality if Gemma shares the information. Nurses are able to communicate about patient-related information with other health professionals via social media or other means of technology, i.e. telephone calls, in regards to patient care. However, this type of technology often leads to a breach of patient privacy and confidentiality (Berman et. al, 2015,