Master's Program and HIPAA

[BabsRN-BSN]

I am working on my MSN in Management and Leadership. Often the assignments say something like discuss an example from your practice. I will never give patient information and I know not to do that. My question is how do you refer to the patient? If you change the name just to make the writing easier to George for example (instead of patient A) how do you note in the writing that the name has been changed?

[londonflo]

4 hours ago, BabsRN-BSN said:

how do you note in the writing that the name has been changed?

Can you use a footnote?

[Hoosier_RN, MSN]

I wrote "the patient, Susan Jones (not the patient's real name), had..." per the direction of my professor

[JKL33]

Also, you probably don't need to call them anything any more than absolutely necessary. I don't prefer to make up names. So when possible I would say, "One patient reported...." Etc.  Keep things generic: "Recently I was performing service recovery with a patient who reported a lengthy wait in the emergency department waiting room of a community hospital...."

Just limit the amount of hassle altogether as much as possible.

[Hannahbanana, BSN, MSN]

You could also use obviously made-up initials, especially if you are referring to more than one person: AA, BB, CC, DD, etc.

[RNNPICU, BSN, RN]

Other things you can try is something like this.

In my setting I often have clinical issues in management such a,b,c

I have responded such to these issue in this way a,b,c

Often the patient population we see have these clinical issues

Our hospuital has XXX protocols and policies to address these clinical issues.

 

Recently I had to respond to XXX clinical issue.  The patient had complex medical/social/etc issues.  My response included ....

 

There are ways to discuss your clinical setting without too much evidence. Obviously if something is very specific, I would use other examples.