Dangerous Patient Confidentiality

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One pillar of society that all people feel or entrust total faith and safety in is the healthcare profession. We blindly put our trust and lives in their hands for all health needs. But, healthcare laws may hinder healthcare workers providing safety to the patient and public by maintaining medical confidentiality that keep medical history private. HIPPA and other state laws may inhibits the healthcare practitioner(s) from forewarning police of possible harm from a patient mentally ill to oneself or others. The article Caring for the Dangerous Patient: Legal and Ethical Considerations provides the correlation of mental illness, mass-shootings, and legal and ethical issues of warning authorities and possible victim(s) of danger. This article …show more content…
Further the article provides the premise of the writing is to help the nurse practitioner with this unusual situations that may require unusual actions. It provides the origin of patient privacy, duty of confidentiality, the duty to warn and duty to protect in law (McMullen, Howie, B., Howie, W., & Philipsen, 2013). The article mentions the ANA code ethics and the Nightingale pledge to keep patients privacy. Then it builds its case of importance of mentioning the 5 most deadly mass shooting associated with mental illness in 2012. The following events; Chardon High School in Ohio; Oikos University in Oakland, California; Aurora, Colorado; College Station Texas; Newtown, Connecticut. These tragic events promotes the need for articles like this to protect and educate healthcare providers. One statistic to provide evidence of this need for change and guidance is that 10% of homicide crimes are committed by the mentally ill patients (Treatment Advocacy Center, 2014). In continuing, the authors provides information on the topic of risk of harm and the duty to report. It begins with the story of a Missouri man planning on committing a mass shooting at a movie premier and how it was thwarted by his mother warning the authorities. In addition, it revisits the aforementioned mass shootings and how mentally ill patients inform others on how they plan on committing harm to others. Next, the 1969 case of Tatiana Tarasoff is introduce and the cause to evoke the law of the duty to warn and duty to protect laws. He victim was murdered after Prosenjit Poddar sought conseling from a university psychologists, in which, informed the campus police of his harmful intent of Ms. Tarasoff, but was released by campus police and later killed Ms. Tarasoff. The need for duty to warn was created to warn not only authorities but also the possible

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