If you work in the nhs would you get in trouble for this?

[Bewilderedbotheredbemused]

Looking at a patient who isn’t your patient’s notes.

so say a nurse on ward a looked a patient x’s (someone the nurse knew) notes who was on ward b. If the nurse was found out, would they get into trouble?

would they be able to tell if a nurse / doc had done something like this after the fact?

(for clarity I have not done something like this, someone I know is making some allegations about another person I also know)

So the nurse worked in the hospital and was asked by the family to help them know what was going on with their relative as they were struggling to get information? That's completely different from accessing information about a famous person out of curiosity.

Still doesn't make it acceptable though does it?

Shouldn't they just have said that they couldn't do that?

It's 100% a breach. Staff cannot look at the records of people they know, be they, friends, family members, or your ex's new squeeze. We can't even look at our own files.

I've known people get fired, have professional registrations removed... But I've also known people get away with a slap on the wrist.

Software if fitted with automatic auditing that records all log ins that look at a record and what they looked at. You can ask a healthcare provider (hospital/GP surgery) to look at the audit trails if you have suspicions that someone has gained your health or personal information through abuse of position.

Has the health care worker got any evidence they can save of the family asking them to access the records, text/WhatsApp messages, call log etc? Or their replies to the family that would show they were passing on updates to the family?

I don’t know… I doubt it but it’s possible. All I know is that the family were singing the praises of this person at one point, saying how much the person helped them and then after the falling out it is something they are dangling over their head.

now I don’t know how the records were accessed or updates were given. Maybe they phoned down to a ward to ask, maybe they walked down to ask or maybe they looked up the records (maybe it was on someone else’s ID or they asked someone else to do it) I really don’t know. Maybe it’s a lie or an exaggeration from the family and maybe the HCW visited the patient in one of their breaks and verbally passed on feedback based on their observation. I don’t know, but I am worried for this person, who I’m not sure knows this attack is coming and I can’t warn them out of fear of reprisals

Doesn’t make a difference - they could have it in writing from both the patient and the family - it’s still gross misconduct.

It is expressly forbidden to do so, it really doesn’t matter who asked or why. The worker would know it was not allowed. It’s drummed into you constantly.

In the rare circumstances you believe it would be justified for some reason, you get it signed off by your manager to protect you from precisely this situation.

I work in criminal justice , I lead an investigation into similar. The officer had accessed a record of someone when their family member came to get and said they were worried about his well being and couldn't find him. Rather than go to his officer and say Johnny's brother came in and is worried about him, you might want to make contact/visit him at home etc she checked the record and told the family member that he'd been in touch with his officer regularly and there was nothing to worry about and that he was engaging in particular treatment. She got fired. The person whose information she'd disclosed had not given permission for his information to be shared and she shouldn't have even confirmed he was known to the CJ agency.

I think this healthcare worker is in for some trouble

The HCW is definitely going to get in trouble. How it wasn't flagged up at the time is confusing. A relative works for NHS and said she got contacted almost immediately after accessing the wrong file ( it was a case of same named patients, nothing sinister) and was able to explain it. But to access a file of another patient is very wrong. The stealing paracetamol could be traced, they keep an eye on medication don't they? If the accuser has no proof of that, the HCW will be able to deny it. But on top of the file issue, it could be bad.

When I did my medical records training about 20 years ago, I was given a few lists of record numbers and asked to pull the paper notes for each clinic. Randomly, one of the numbers from the first list turned out to be my mum's file, so I told the person who was training me and handed the file over to them while I looked for the rest, it never even occurred to me to look inside. Told my mum later, and she said 'I would have looked at yours'. Thanks mum!
I work for a local authority now and we share a CRM with social care. There's definitely an audit trail and the same rules apply as the NHS - breaching confidentiality is a sackable offence.
I would warn the person if you can, OP, let them at least get their side of the story in first. Also, who would steal paracetamol when there are opiates available? They're like 29p a pack. What an odd accusation

I wish I could warn them but the blowback on me will be huge, and as you can probably tell the family are Petty and not very nice when you get on their wrong side.

im not sure if she did or if she had a cracker of a headache and said and then someone was like oh, take the box it’s fine or if she genuinely was lifting boxes at a time

My role involves investigating this type of allegation in the NHS. We use the audit trail to prove whether someone has or hasn't looked at notes and we also look at whether anyone unexpected looked at those notes (could someone have looked at them using a different profile). You'd also consider evidence of them knowing things they shouldn't know otherwise.

Absolutely gross misconduct if proven.

It doesn’t matter whether the other person asked or not. If someone asks you you say ‘no’ and don’t do it. Simple as that.

The nurse made the decision to do it even though she must have known she shouldn’t do it and it would be shown on the system if they are using erecords.

If it does come to a disciplinary I don’t think it would be advisable to try and excuse her behaviour. She appears to be guilty of at least one and possible 2 different breaches here and ‘somebody asked me to do it and now they’ve turned on me is not as excuse’. She needs to show some understanding of what she did wrong and why she won’t be doing it again.

Question - if your family member disappeared and you rang round the hospitals to find out if they'd had an accident and been admitted, does that mean you've got no way of finding out?!

Yep that is a breach of personal information. I would inform the Trusts Caldicot guardian and the appropriate process and action will be taken.

A nurse knows not to take a box of paracetamol off the ward whatever the circumstances. Taking 2 herself could be explained but she knows she should then go and buy her own. It would have been better if she spoke to the nurse in charge of the other ward to say the family had concerns which that ward could have spoken to the patient and family about with their consent. I am guessing the patient didn't give consent to share info and was angry with the family and the family are blaming the nurse now.

It's very unlikely the nurse visited the patient on her break during the covid outbreak as wards were closed.

No the patient was very grateful, they’ve passed away since then and the nurse helped locate them and give an update on the patients health when they weren’t getting anywhere else.

i think now what happened was, the hcw borrowed one of the other hcw’s actually looking after the patients card (not sure what that means) to look at patients records. So they asked a colleague and the colleague let them, but from a digital footprint pov it will look like the colleague who was actually
looking after the patient checked the notes again which could be explained away. Apparently at that trust you can only see patients notes for patients on your ward.

the hcw and a her partner (the family member making the complaint) broke up, he was abusing her and now it’s just another means to attack her.

Every nurse knows that id badges cannot be shared, especially to access records, it was wrong to ask and the nurse knew that. Implicating another member of staff will not help. If she was allowed access she could have used her own id card.

OP I’m an nhs worker. If you look at a patient’s notes that you aren’t caring for you have to input a reason into the system as to why. One of the reasons is usually ‘express permission of service user’. For children, this can include parents. For an adult, it would depend on how competent they were at the time and whether a family member had the legal right to make decisions for them. Child Safeguarding matters can override this, but not much else.
The person involved will be investigated, may be dismissed, or given formal warning and training, depending on what is found in their case. Generally though, family members have no right to a patient’s notes or to ask a clinician to access those notes.

I’m an NHS manager and once had a complaint of a member of my team accessing notes of someone they knew, they then made reference to what they’d seen in the notes on social media. It was really stupid and she lost her job because of it. Whether or not the person is making the report maliciously, unfortunately the HCP has accessed notes they shouldn’t have and will face some form of disciplinary. What I will say is, in my situation if the person had A. Not shared the info on social media and B. Been in any way remorseful / willing to accept they’d done wrong and reflect on it, they may not have actually lost their job. So as long as they’re open to the process and can reflect on why they shouldn’t have done it then they might get away with a telling off. As for the reports of stealing drugs, they won’t get anywhere with that if there’s no evidence and the HCP is otherwise reliable and it’s one report isolation with malicious intent.

I was hoping it would be ok for the hcw due to plausible deniability, her colleague would be unlikely to admit to it as it’s ‘wrong’ for her to have leant her key card and then the hcw wouldn’t admit to it either as obviously it’s an offense… so I was hoping for her sake it would be dismissed as malicious and mudslinging?

i know she shouldn’t have but knowing the circumstances it’s just an abuser carrying on with the abuse x

Do you work in the NHS?

Patients need to give permission for information the be shared, we often had patients who refused to share, but didn't want to tell their family.

So family ring up, then accuse ward staff of withholding information. Nothing the staff can do. They can't even say permission to share has been declined.

The idea some random on the ward can start giving out information on a whim to help the family out is just laughable.

Not long after we went computerised we had a famous patient, all staff who accessed his notes without good reason were given final written warnings, this was decades ago.

Now it would be instant dismissal, and rightly so. This is drilled into you at least once a year.

Sackable and easy to get found out / trace

Why would the nurse deny asking to use someone else's id card, that's just a lie and you don't know what reason she gave for asking someone else to share their id.

Apparently the other nurse was told it was to look at so and sos records

What explanation did she give why she couldn't access the records herself or use her own id. Lying never looks good. I would admit it, reflect on my behaviour and apologise, hopefully she is in a union.