Hospital Workers Expose Doctors’ Most Appalling HIPAA Privacy Violations

“When I was in RN school, one of my classmates was assigned a female patient who had a stage 4 pressure ulcer on her coccyx — this was down to the bone and really awful looking. The wound care team had taken a photo of it, and that photo was in the patient’s chart.

My classmate removed the photo from the chart and took it home with her, where she showed it around to her family and also a teenage neighbor. The neighbor told her parents, who were so outraged that they called the school and reported it.

When our clinical group showed up at the hospital for our next class, which was two days later, the instructor tore into her in front of the whole group. She didn’t deny taking the photo, and in fact, had it in her backpack. She said she was going to return it to the chart. She apologized but didn’t seem to think she had done anything too wrong.

She was kicked out of the program. We were only a month from graduation, too.”

—miz_mantis