yay4stress
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I got a question about patient confidentiality.
I was on a call the other day to an apartment building. Our PT was an elderly woman, in fact, that describes most of the residents of the building. I know from many, many, many, past calls to this place that residents there tend to be rather nosy about why the ambulance is there. Sometimes, this can be helpful when we need to know more about a resident.
This particular call, however, I encountered a situation I wasn't quite a sure about. I was in the hall, prepping the stretcher, and someone came down the hall and asked if I was going to be taking the person in that room to the hospital. I asked if he was family, he said no, and I sort of shrugged it off saying I didn't not yet.
Now, either way, I wouldn't have given out any information about condition or why we were there, or any otehr personal information. But situations like this are notoriously tricky about what you can and can't say on a call. My reasoning went like this:
"He is able to get into this building, and knows which room this is. Me telling him that we were or weren't going to transport could possibly lead back to him knowing something about the pt that she wouldn't necessarily want him to know".
Am I being over-cautious here?
I was on a call the other day to an apartment building. Our PT was an elderly woman, in fact, that describes most of the residents of the building. I know from many, many, many, past calls to this place that residents there tend to be rather nosy about why the ambulance is there. Sometimes, this can be helpful when we need to know more about a resident.
This particular call, however, I encountered a situation I wasn't quite a sure about. I was in the hall, prepping the stretcher, and someone came down the hall and asked if I was going to be taking the person in that room to the hospital. I asked if he was family, he said no, and I sort of shrugged it off saying I didn't not yet.
Now, either way, I wouldn't have given out any information about condition or why we were there, or any otehr personal information. But situations like this are notoriously tricky about what you can and can't say on a call. My reasoning went like this:
"He is able to get into this building, and knows which room this is. Me telling him that we were or weren't going to transport could possibly lead back to him knowing something about the pt that she wouldn't necessarily want him to know".
Am I being over-cautious here?