Study on Handling Personal Information in Clinical Training

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the actual conditions of handling personal information in clinical training and to clarify the ethical issues involved, so as to examine the ethical education system at nursing universities. Educational directors of 83 nursing universities in Japan were asked to respond to a mailed survey. Questionnaire items included: the manner in which patient information was obtained and recorded, the nature of the information requested, the manner in which the forms were kept, and the question whether patients were informed that their personal information would be accessed by nursing students.Replies from directors of 44 universities(a collection rate of 53.0%) were received and analyzed. Results showed that over 75% of the nursing universities directed their students to record 11 items of personal patient information, including name, age, sex, family members, date of hospitalization, and occupation. Also, more than 40% of the universities allowed the students to delete every other character of the patient's name thus making easy identification of individual patients difficult. During clinical training, 95.5% of the nursing universities held their students individually responsible for the keeping of the forms, and after clinical training, 63.6% of the universities continued to hold the students responsible. Only 34.1% of the patients were informed that their personal information was being accessed by students. These results show that the actual conditions of handling personal information in clinical training involve ethical issues such as recording unnecessary personal information, accessing personal information without informed consent, and individual keeping of the forms by students.