Confidentiality: Nurse Fired For Diverting Quality Assurance Document.
Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession
June 2016
With the evidence for her civil service hearing the nurse included the quality assurance incident report about the medication error.
The document contained the resident’s name, address, doctor’s name and the prescribed medication and the original prescription itself was attached.
NEW YORK SUPREME COURT APPELLATE DIVISION May 5, 2016The administrator of a state-operated nursing home started proceedings under New York’s civil service law to have a registered nurse removed from her job. In her defense the nurse offered as evidence at her hearing an original incident report that she took from an internal quality assurance file at the nursing home. At that point an additional charge was brought against the nurse for removing and disclosing a confidential document without permission which contained a resident’s protected health information.
The New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, upheld the nurse’s termination without having to consider the original charges against her. Misappropriating and revealing the confidential incident report was enough to get her fired. The nurse had no permission from the nursing home to take the document from its files. Nor was there any excuse for violating the medical confidentiality of the resident to whom the document pertained. The facility turned over copies of certain documents to the nurse’s attorney, but this was not one of them. She apparently had already purloined the original from the file before the file was copied for the attorney.
Bruso v. Clinton, __ N.Y.S.3d __, 2016 WL 2350555 (N.Y. App., May 5, 2016).More references from nursinglaw.com
http://www.nursinglaw.com/quality-review-patient-lawsuit.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/quality-assurance-privilege.htm
http://www.nursinglaw.com/quality-assurance-peer-review.pdf
http://www.nursinglaw.com/quality-review-privilege.htm