Japanese Nurses’ Perception of Patients’ Privacy and the Sharing of Patients’ Information among Nurses

抄録

 Patients’ rights have become very hot topics in health care. Privacy is one of these rights. Nurses in clinical settings deal with the information on many patients and share it within the nursing team because nursing is practiced as a team. Sometimes, sharing patients’ information may put the privacy of a patient at risk. To explore how the nurses perceive patients’ privacy and how they share that information and to what extent, we conducted a questionnaire survey with 179 hospital nurses. We obtained 141 (79%) valid answers. Major findings are as follows: 1) on information directly related to nursing care, nurses perceived patients’ privacy lower than their own, 2) patients' information that was recorded on the chart tended to be shared by all nurses in the ward, on the other hand, information needed to nursing care tend to be shared within the team concerned with the patients’ care, 3) the main reason for limitation of the range of information sharing was whether or not it was necessary for nursing care.