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London College of Professional Studies

Assignment Cover Page

Student name

Ali Caroline Ozioma

Student ID

20793

Submission date

11/03/2025

Qualification title

OTHM Level 3 Foundation Diploma in Health & Social Care

Qualification code

603/6776/3

Unit title

Effective Handling of Information in Health and Social Care Settings

Unit code

L/618/5294

I declare that the attached work is entirely my own and that all sources have been acknowledged ☐

Introduction

Management of the service user details involves the security arrangements necessary to allow only authorized health workers to access the patient information.. Effective information management is necessary in enhancing the safety of the patients and minimizing the risk of exposure to lawsuits as well as maintaining the confidentiality of the patients.

In today’s medical record systems, the safety of an individual’s personal data has become a fundamental requirement because of increasing privacy issues in the healthcare sector. Due to this increased focus on privacy, there are more serious consequences for failure to comply healthcare laws on patients data confidentiality. The financial penalties imposed for breach of privacy laws have become more stringent. This is to reduce the release of too many details of a patent to unauthorized persons (Neame, 2014).

1.1. Legislations and Codes of Practice for Information Handing

United Kingdom most important legislative framework on patient data safety is the Data Protection Act (DPA) 2018, which oversees how service use personal details, including healthcare information, is stored, and processed in accordance with the UK GDPR. The Health and Social Care (Safety and Quality) Act 2015 requires healthcare professionals to share relevant patient information with other specialists when necessary to improve patient care, while ensuring compliance with data protection regulations. Lastly, the Health and Safety Work Act (HSWA) 1974 is focused on ensuring adequate safety and good working conditions for employees and patients within a particular healthcare environment, which the following legislative framework help protect patients data from being exposed and help increase patient satisfaction and safety in the healthcare sector.

1.2. Legal Requirements and Codes of Practice

Health and social care workers are required to follow key legislative procedures, including , the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), and the Common Law Duty of Confidentiality (CLDC), which allow employees to strengthen the codes and practices of health and safety training. Enacted in 2015, the Health and Social Care (Safety and Quality) is arguably another piece of UK’s legislation that protects information. Finally, the Health and Safety at Work Act (HSWA) 1974 ensures that the employees in workmplaces are safeguarded from harmful factors within the working conditions including hazardous chemicals.

2.1. Security of Manual and Electronic Information Storage

Maintaining accurate and high-quality electronic or manual medical records is essential for ensuring continuity of patient care and delivering effective healthcare services (Parameshwari et al., 2022). Effective information handling is essential for maintaining patient confidentiality, ensuring proper handling of patient medical records, and complying with certain legal obligations. Manual information storage means keeping patients’ records in the form of paper files and records. Provision of safety of such information poses a special risk as it includes a need to guard against unauthorised access, theft, and an unintentional loss.

2.2 Practices of Security While Accessing Information

Use of strong passwords:

staff should be made to execute complex, long, and unique passwords, and these should periodically be changed to ensure the breaches are lessened.

Regular Software Updates:

Keeping software and systems updated is one of the most important things in terms of prevention against security vulnerabilities. The constant updating of health information software to the recent security patches will help reduce the chances of cyberattacks.

2.3 Importance of Maintaining of Records

2.3 Importance of maintaining records

Medical records are vital for medical expert workers to uphold due because they help promote data security and protect patients privacy, which helps increase patient safety and satisfaction in a particular health care environment.

Adherence to the Legal and Regulatory Requirements

The health and social care sector is required to comply with the Data Protection Act to ensure the security and confidentiality of patient information, and other local policies.

Patient Safety

Proper recording gives information to healthcare personnel when it comes to patient diagnoses and treatments, as well as knowing when the patient has a history of certain medications or allergies, thus enabling appropriate interventions.

Communication

Medical records are essential for ensuring continuity of patient care, as physicians rely on them daily to provide effective treatment. Given the volume of cases they handle, it is unrealistic to expect them to recall every patient's details without proper documentation (Omokanye & Adepoju, 2024).

Report

Introduction

Accurate record-keeping is always very important within the health and social care environment for different reasons, such as ensuring safety to patients, meeting legal requirements, and quality management. These are the core reasons why record maintenance is important.

3.1. Concept of Confidentiality

Confidentiality is a vital component of the doctor-patient relationship protected in equity, common law, and statutory regulation, as well as through professional discipline. Confidentiality in a health care environment helps make patients feel safe and satisfied with a particular health care system and promote trust between patient and health and social care worker. If the patients are not assured that doctors or other healthcare professionals will maintain confidentiality, they may not give important information about their diseases, especially those that they find embarrassing (Mendelson & Rees, 2014).

Nurses have an ethical responsibility to maintain patient confidentiality, but how to strike a balance between what can be shared and with whom, and how to keep the patient's families and friends in the loop regarding their condition remains a challenging problem (McCullough & Schell-Chaple, 2013). Lastly, medical confidentiality is pertinent in a health and social care sector for promoting patient safety, respectful and trustworthy environment for patient. It help protect patient information from being exposed or leaked and it is paramount for provision of quality care for patient.

3.2.1. Maintenance of Confidentiality

Confidentiality in health and social care enables carers to save personal data of service users from being accessed by any unauthorised person, as individuals are prevented from viewing the information without being allowed access to it.

Role-Based Access Control:

One of the ways to protect patient privacy is to limit access to this type of information only for those who need it in order to perform their duties. healthcare workers should only have access to patient information that their work profile demands. This will help prevents unauthorised individuals from viewing any patient information.

Adequate training of Healthcare workers:

health and social care workers should be train on how to maintain patient privacy and confidentiality helps improve data security and protection of patients information from being exposed. This duty primarily falls on the healthcare professional in charge of attending the patient, but we cannot obviate the fundamental role of universities and healthcare institutions in training future professionals, and this promote professional integrity with the aim of providing a standard of excellence in care quality and at a medical educationlevel, and also facilitate a culture of respect and trust among healthcare workers and patients (Coverdale, 2016).

Proper data management

The use of data encryption to protect patients data is another crucial step for maintaining patient confidentiality, it helps transform patient data into a secure and unreadable format that can be only accessible to the particular patient with the right decryption key. Also using of strong passwords to protect patient information is another essential security measure to help maintain confidentiality in a healthcare environment.

Figure 1: Strategies for maintaining confidentiality

Source: (FasterCapital, 2022)

3.2.2. Promotion of Confidentiality

Confidentiality and privacy are particularly important to adolescents who seek medical confidentiality6. In a particular case; the trauma in children and adolescents requires health confidentiality (George and Bhila, 2019).

Confidentiality in a health care environment help make patients feel safe and satisfied with a particular health care system and promote trust between patient and health and social care worker.

Establishing Clear Policies and Procedures:

Health care organisations should provide clear policies for maintaining patient information. Such policies must allow for the identification of what information is to be kept confidential, the sharing of such information, and what happens if this policy is neglected. Employees shall be familiar with them and relate to the policies in relation to patients.

Education and Training Programs:

The should be constant training of healthcare providers on maintaining confidentiality of patient information. This education should teach how patient information are maintained and how to use data encryption for patient data. Situations that may entail invading other people’s confidentiality can be illustrated, and ethical ways out can be taught.

Secure Handling of Patient Records:

Health and social care organizations patient information must be safeguarded in the highest order possible. Computer databases for storing patients's health record should be secured with using strong passwords, while filing cabinets for lifting off physical documents ought to be key-locked. Access to patient files should be restricted to authorised persons only. This should be done in private places away from unauthorised personnel whenever health care givers converse about the patient. Protection would have to incorporate a patient's privilege to consent to treatment, authorize release of information regarding treatment, and prevent accidental disclosures either via billing practices, electronic aggregation of data for quality improvement, research, or public health reporting (Blythe et al., 2012).

Figure 2: promotion of confidentiality

Source: (FasterCapital, 2024)

3.3. The the potential tension between maintaining an individual’s confidentiality and disclosing information.

Protecting data within an organisation faces several challenges. The first challenge pertains to staff knowledge and capacity, where some employees may go against company policy and so expose sensitive information due to ignorance. Another limitation concerns organisations that do not have established organisational policies relating to information security. In addition, sharing workspaces in an office environment presents a challenge as some discussions or documents that may be sensitive may be disclosed (Smith et al., 2015). Informed consent remains a central issue in biomedical ethics (Darby, 2018). The hospital's physical health environment can also present barriers to patient confidentiality, particularly for multipatient room rounds where it is more challenging to maintain privacy (Kerr et al., 2014).

Public health concern and workplace safety can also lead to limitation in maintaining confidentiality in a healthcare setting. When a patient is incapacitated or unconscious and unable to provide consent it may lead to medical personnel sharing patient information to family members.

Conclusion

It is through effective handling of patient information that the confidentiality of patients will be protected. This is because confidentiality protects information about health that is not only significant to every individual in terms of privacy but also towards the general development of health services. With the adoption of robust methods of managing patients' personal information, the healthcare setting will avoid breaches of confidentiality and build trust, which are very critical in the delivery of optimal care and improvement of health outcomes.

References

Blythe, M.J. et al. (2012). Standards for health information technology to ensure adolescent privacy. Pediatrics, 130(5), 987-990

Coverdale JH, Roberts LW, Balon R, Beresin EV, Louie AK, Guerrero AP, et al. (2016). Professional integrity and the role of medical students in professional self-regulation. AcadPsychiatry. 40(3):525-9.

Darby WC, Weinstock R. (2018). The Limits of Confidentiality: Informed Consent and Psychotherapy. Focus (Am Psychiatr Publ).16(4):395-401.

Data Protection Act. (2018). Data Protection Act 2018. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/12/contents/enacted

FasterCapital. (2022). Communicating The Importance Of Confidentiality To Clients. Retrieved from https://fastercapital.com/topics/communicating-the-importance-of-confidentiality-to-clients.html

FasterCapital. (2022). Strategies for maintaining confidentiality. Retrieved from https://fastercapital.com/topics/strategies-for-maintaining-confidentiality.html

George and Bhila. ( 2019). Security, Confidentiality and Privacy in Health of Healthcare Data. International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development 3(4),

Kerr, S. Lu, L. McKinlay. (2014). Towards patient-centredcare: Perspectives of nurses and midwives to regarding shift-to-shift bedside handover. International Journal of Nursing Practice, 20 (3),250-257

McCullough, J., & Schell-Chaple, H. (2013). Maintaining patient' privacy and confidentiality with family communications in the intensive care unit. CriticalCare Nurse, 33(5), 77-79. doi: 10.4037/ccn2013310

Mendelson, Danuta & Rees, Anne. (2014). Medical confidentiality and patient privacy.

Neame RLB. (2014). Privacy protection for personal health information and shared care records. Inform Prim Care. 21(2):84-91

Omokanye and Adepoju, (2024). Influence of health information management practices on the quality of healthcare service delivery in OAUTHC Ile-Ife, Osun State Nigeria. World Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews, 2024, 21(01), 1752-1765

Parameshwari, Suresh Kumar, P. K., Marla, Amitha P., & Swati Rai, (2022). Comparison between Retrieval Time of Manual and Electronic Medical Records –A Case Study. International Journal of Case Studies in Business, IT, and Education (IJCSBE), 6(2),1-14.

Smith, J., Roberts, L., & Hughes, M. (2015).Challenges in maintaining corporate data security: A review of training and policy limitations. Journal of Information Security, 12(3), 214-230.

Tegegne, M.D., Melaku, M.S., Shimie, A.W. et al. (2022). Health professionals' knowledge and attitude towards patient confidentiality and associated factors in a resource-limited setting: a cross-sectional study. BMC Med Ethics 23, 26

The Health and Social Care (Safety and Quality) Act 2015: UK Parliament. (2015). Health and Social Care (Safety and Quality) Act 2015. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2