Hi everyone. I am currently a second semester nursing student and this morning I attended a meeting with the dean of our nursing program where I was informed that I had committed a HIPAA violation and was consequently placed on academic probation for the remainder of my program. There were four people involved in the situation, and all of us were placed on probation. I was not aware that what I did constituted a violation and I have the opportunity to challenge this decision so I wanted to get the opinion of others to help me decide what to do.
The story is long so I'll only explain my role in the situation.
A friend in my study group was at her clinical site. She sent a text to our study group asking what we would do if another student in our clinical group was saying that they were very overwhelmed and had thoughts of committing suicide. She did not give any identifying information other than the fact that this person was in her clinical group. I advised her as to what I thought she should do. She later responded that she and another student approached their clinical instructor and the clinical instructor took the student that was struggling to the ER and they had the potential to be placed on an involuntary 72 hour hold. At no time was this person's identity disclosed and I did not know who we were talking about.
On a different day, I was commiserating with another student about how hard school is with kids and work and I said that I had heard that a student in *my friend's name*'s clinical group had expressed that they were overwhelmed and threatening to kill themselves. We basically just talked about how bad we felt that someone in our class was feeling that way and that if we knew who it was we would do our best to support them.
Long story short, that was the extent of my involvement. It got back to our professors that this was being discussed and they were extremely unhappy which is why we had to attend that meeting today. So to those of you that are much more familiar with HIPAA laws, does this sound like I violated it to you? Thanks for any input you can offer.
