Nursing student Hipaa violation

[Dhready]

Hi

I'm new here and was hoping for some advice. I was recently dismissed from my LPN program for HIPAA violation. I was told it was a HIPAA violation and I was lucky the hospital wasn't going to report it. I was also told that I had no appeal.

What happened was this, I went to preassign at about 6 p.m. at night. I took my 14 year old son and I was told that I could put him in a type of waiting area while I did my work. I was allowed to do this a couple weeks back as well so I believed there was no issue. I had become friendly with an ex-patient. I had not had this patient for over a month. Feeling badly because this patient was so ill and still in the hospital I stopped quickly just to say hello. I informed him that I was leaving and I was in the process of getting my son who was waiting for me. The patient asked me to please bring my son into his room and let him meet him. Considering I had the patient request this I didn't think it was a problem. I went and got my son who was waiting for me and let him meet the patient. Then we left.

About a week and a half later I was called to the administrator's office that the hospital had written to them with their concerns. They said when the patient was asked if my son was his visitor he said no. However I'm not sure how the questioning was presented to the patient. Considering my son and I were not unplanned visitors, you can understand the answer.

I was dismissed from the program and told that the hospital would not be reporting it as I could be in a lot more trouble. This obviously scared me greatly and I haven't even tried to appeal any decision. We touched on HIPAA briefly but an incident like this wasn't really discussed.

I'm just trying to get some info as I have been scouring any information I can find about HIPAA to see where I went wrong. I'm also afraid to try to appeal to get back into this program even though I spent a lot of money and effort and I had the top grades in the class. As some of you might say from what I've read in past posts, there might be more to the story. One of my clinical instructors didn't seem to like me very much and maybe this could be a deciding factor? Meaning that I read somewhere once that if you are already having issues Maybe they won't be so keen on keeping you and will let you go. I didn't have any issues except for one time I didn't get a patient washed up quick enough for her liking.

As you can imagine there's a lot and it would take a lot of info to give you more. I'm willing to do that for some insight here and any advice of what I should do. Should I try to fight this or should I leave well enough alone. I don't remember signing anything with HIPAA and I remember getting a very general HIPAA education.

[psu_213, BSN, RN]

You haven't posted enough. Strongly suggest you review school policy on bringing minor children to clinical sites as that may be.a larger issue

I agree. Even if you get permission from your school and the facility to have your son stay in the waiting area, I would be worried that it could still become an issue later.

I almost hate to say this: I'm not doubting that your son is a good kid, but even the best behaved 14 years olds do silly things. I would hate to see you get in trouble if your son is accused of something (whether he did it or not).

You have to make sacrifices to be successful in school, and this is one of those cases.

[Qing]

You made the mistake to bring your child to meet a patient that you had contact with during your clinical. You did not see the harm in it, but you probably broke the program rules about bringing children to where you are job training. It was a mistake that you did not mean to make and its possible you can get into another program but I cannot tell you if you will. I don't think this is HIPAA violation and that your boundaries as a nurse and patient were crossed inappropriately. However, I don't get the feeling that it was just because of that single event and there is a bigger issue at hand. If its the relationship of the school and hospital, then bringing your child brings a lot of problems for them. The nursing manager or staff there would have an issue and reported it to the hospital so that is one thing. So now the school looks bad and looks unprofessional. I do not know the relationship between the school and hospital, but your dismissal probably had something to do with that too. Don't give up and keep going!