A Reflection on the Performance in a Professional Environment - Essay Example

A reflective essay on performance in a professional environment (confidentiality) As a university student taking a degree course in Assistant Practitioner Foundation in healthcare and also a community healthcare assistant with the district nursing team, I have a job with intensive roles. I undertake visits to homes of patients, conduct insulin, venepuncture (taking bloods), bandaging and also wound dressing. I also assist District nurses with double handed visits, write progress notes and lastly order equipment for various patients. This reflexive essay focuses on the confidentiality as an aspect of the professional practice within my personal (Sobh & Elleithy, 2010, p231). It profoundly presents my own and entailed. Professional development, comprehensive understanding of legal and entailed ethical foundations concerned with confidentiality and entailed reflection on attitude and behavior that recurrently impact on daily service delivery processes. The reflexive essay entails enormous consideration into UK laws attaching on the exposure of the confidential information regarding the patients’ health conditions and how it has affected my role as a health worker in UK. It also highlights on the touchy past issues entrenched in the confidentiality part (Great Britain & Amy, 2012, p75). According to UN Economic Commission for Europe, 2009, confidentiality is an entrenched obligation and mandatory to any provider of certain data or information to highly maintain the privacy of the information (Tranberg & Rashbass, 2004, p79). Thus in professional requirements , all the agencies entailed in collection of information from different people or even organizations have an astounding roles and entailed legal or consequent ethical liability to ensure that they timely respect the privacy or secrecy of the people providing the information (Clark & Mcghee, 2008, p73). In similar proportions, the entailed individuals or organizations are not identified in any disseminated dataset and also there is concurrent and vivid difference in the connection between confidentiality and privacy. While undertaking my personal roles I have learnt of the importance of confidentiality as failure or breach of confidentiality or entailed disclosure of patients’ information which have the potentials of intruding into his or her privacy as a person or even associated an organization (Anderson, 1997, p96). As a healthcare assistant I have personally regarded Confidentiality as the principal obligation of data custodians or the variant agencies associated with data collection to systematically keep the confidential information, they are continuously entrusted with utmost secrecy and care. The availability of this tool or system allows for the optimum acquisition of relevant data that aids in control various ailments and collection of statistic without having implications on personal capacity of the patients. High level of Maintaining patients’ or the public trust elevates the chances of obtaining better quality data and an advanced response to data collections process in ordinary life. Thus over the short period as healthcare assistant I have observed that continual protection of confidentiality is a solution element in enhanced maintaining the trust by the data providers. The data obtained hence are very relevant and sufficient for use by the governments, community and researchers. The society over time has been trained to view certain medical challenges as horrible and therefore they are always (Parry & Parry, 2009). Patient confidentiality has been a massive issue particularly in consideration of the past cases that enormous chunks of information had been leaked to the public, according Freedom of Information Act requests. Nationally vast numbers of patients information were accessed in entirely inappropriate manner, and this includes the 23 incidents mainly involving the patient information hugely posted on the main social networking sites. Another incident saw the essential 24 NHS Trusts observed the confidential information extremely taken, lost, stolen, or left behind by medical staff while in their operations. There was other issues regarding the virtually 91 cases of NHS involving employees who were looking up details for colleagues in the database (Anderson, 1997, p96). Nationally, there were cases where the 44 NHS trusts could not respond to the forwarded Freedom of Information request and associated 55 Trusts hugely refused to timely release all some parts of the information they had been required to issue. These were massive consideration breaches of Data Protection policy which would have lead to appropriate punishment, but only resulted in the dismissal of staff. According national health services principles and laws patients, or even their close relatives or guardians have their due right to anticipate social services (NHS) and entailed healthcare workers to safeguard their personal information as confidential. The NHS demands that patients ‘information must not be passed to the third parties for instance the workers in the voluntary sector, other members of the patients family, local councillors and many other people in absence of the patient’s consent (Sobh & Elleithy,2010, p231). This rule has compelled us to work under strict conditions expounding on the maintaining the personal information held in office files and subsequent computer records that can only be seen or only accessible to the selected people entailed in the patient's care. District nursing team similar to other organizations have a written policy on confidentiality thus the district nursing team is consequently compelled to ensure high levels of keeping the information in very secure location (Klosek, 2011, p342). Following the period of practicing I have realized that there are instances where an authority may obtain a right to access that patient's data thus breaking the rules regarding confidentiality but this scenario is usually in the most extreme situations, for instance, the patient is suspected of terrorism, concerns regards the child's safety or even if the cases of crime are entailed in the process (Mason, Laurie & Mccall Smith, 2013, p352). A typical rule running the confidentiality in the health services section requires the Data Protection Act that frequently entrenches on the nearly all social services even entailed health records where it means that to any information regarding the patient should be kept accurately and in the most secure. The law equally accords the patients all the rights to access the information held about his or her personal and medical status. This fact is highly significant while trying to assess the level of care accorded to patient and his or her ability to desire for changes or even improvements in various sector of treatments (Parry & Parry, 2009). Most of my patients has always reacted negatively information regarding their sugar levels and concern they have to use insulin to keep on living. Most of them feel less superior and need continued support during treatment. Slight exposure of their medical conditions to undesired public could always trigger huge punitive in terms of public image deterioration. During medical work field exposure I have witnessed comparatively less instances of the confidentiality cases since of the cases experienced are normal to the society and do not ignite much uproar as concerned with other severe cases like exposing of persons HIV status. HIV remains a dreaded and a stigmatizing health condition that most patients fear revealing their status to the entire public. Inconsequential exposure by the health worker hence implies huge penalty to the concerned health worker (Clark & Mcghee, 2008, p73). The medical profession compels or requires the patients to reveal historical health backgrounds and family associated health records which hugely help in lighting the process of disease diagnosing and treatment process. Most patients are easy while providing their information regarding the past health records since they are assured of the confidentiality of the data they provide (Great Britain & Amy, 2012, p75). In conclusion the roles assigned to me that hugely entails visits into patients homesteads for conducting insulin, venepuncture (taking bloods), bandaging and also wound dressing And my role in assisting the district nurses exposed to great information regarding maintenance of the confidentiality between a health delivered and the patient. The outdoor roles were quite challenging and intensive, but timely action was relevant according the desired output to the medical atmosphere. Most of the bandaging on wounds was minor injuries derived from the normal daily works. Most of the patients were very transparent regarding their medical conditions. It was normal scenario for a health worker to serve bullet wounds and other injuries that could be related to crime cases. Most of the criminals avoid public medical places for fear of revelation and apprehension. Another relevant section was confidential handling of the blood data of various patients. Blood information like Rhesus factor, HIV status and much other information were highly held under restricted basis to reduce chances of getting into wrong hands. Under the law I was able to acknowledge the essence and main role stated in the law noting that not every person performing the role of a caretaker has the explicit right to access the patient private health records. The law accords the right certain people as consent by the patient. Thus care’s do not have automatic right to access the documents of the patient at any instance and in any case if a person below the age of the 1 wishes to view his or her personal records then authority must evaluate that possibility of comprehensive understanding of the nature of the request presented. 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