Patient Confidentiality in Nursing Practice: Challenges and Importance

Running head: PATIENT CONFIDENTIALITY 1
Patient Confidentiality
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation

PATIENT CONFIDENTIALITY 2
Patient Confidentiality
One of the significant duties of medical practitioners is to enhance patient confidentiality
at all times. Conventionally, it necessitates health experts to ensure that patients’ individualize or
personal information is kept secret unless patients give consent (Lin & Tsai, 2011). Confidential
documents of patients like theatre lists ought to be discarded more appropriately by paper
shredding to conceal information. This paper endeavors to critically analyze confidentiality and
challenges that hinder its attainment in the nursing practice.
Confidentiality is vital hence it has to be upheld at all costs. Patients frequently provide
nurses with personal data which is paramount in improving the provision of quality care. In case
the privacy of the information is not sustained, trust in the patient-nurse relationship is eroded.
Subsequently, patients would decline sharing out sensitive information (McGowan, 2012). In
addition, this situation would negatively affect their care as well as service delivery.
In establishing an environment of trust by respecting the privacy of patients, it motivates
them to seek medical care hence be truthful. Likewise, it might also intensify a patient’s
willingness to strive for care (Lucassen and Parker, 2010). For situations which could be
stigmatizing, for example, psychiatric, public health, sexual and reproductive health issues,
confidentiality guarantees that personalized data will not be conveyed to employers or family
members without patients’ consent.
There are diverse challenges that restrain the maintenance of patient confidentiality.
Unintentional disclosures could occur in various ways. For instance, when there is insufficient
time, healthcare providers might be tempted into discussing a patient in a public place, however,
maintaining secrecy may be difficult in such scenarios (Blightman, Griffiths and Danbury,
2013). Similarly, handout copies which have distinguishable patient information used in teaching