Nursing field priority...What do you think?

Patient safety through safe RN/LPN to patient ratios.

Right now one of my larger challenges that can harm my clients is the utter misunderstanding about HIPAA. If we nurses can figure this out, and let others know that yes, you can exchange information between displines/facilities between healthcare professionals caring for that client.

We have a trend going where my facility can not get any information about when our residents come home from a hospital! We send them in, and they come back with orders, but no dx or reason why they were really there, or why they qualified to come back to our facility (vs SNF). This can be very dangerous!

In fact, the other day I played 20 questions with an ER nurse explaining my resident's normal activities, Dx and what not...but when I asked her how my resident was she told me that according to HIPAA she couldn't tell me anything! I was floored! I told her I better turn myself in since I gave her all that confidential information and to pleas disregard all my info...she finally said "not good" and I said fine...that is better than nothing.

My hubby who suffered a MI 3 years ago had a large medication error thanks to the fact the Cardiologist didn't specify details to our PCP (and pharmacy who wound up making the largest of the errors). They claimed it was because of HIPAA! They almost killed him, and thank goodness we noticed the error and got him in...stent placement later he is doing better and we ask for copies of EVERYTHING so we can send them to our PCP and vice versa!

I think this has become a large misunderstanding...there is confidentiality, and there is total utter fear..this is fear! And I think it will be us nurses that can solve some of the issues and misunderstandings so we can do away with yet another scare tactic in healthcare!