Policy And Education In The Healthcare Organization

Capstone SLP 4 Student’s Name Institutional Affiliation  Capstone SLP 4 Healthcare organizations or agencies should implement proper policies and establish education programs to facilitate effective communication in the workplace. Both employees and patients have the legal right for a safe healthcare environment. Workers who contract a disease while working should be assisted by their employers to get appropriate treatment. Moreover, healthcare agencies should refrain from sharing patients’ medical information without owners’ consent. In the case of Sara, a home health aide, the agency should investigate and find the person in the human resource department who shared her diagnosis. Afterward, the individual should be punished to deter such actions in the future. The paper focuses on the most appropriate policy and education program that should be implemented to avoid various issues in the healthcare organization. A Policy to Eradicate Mishandling of Patients and Workers Medical Information Although the government of the United States of America (USA) enacted and implemented the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA, 1996), healthcare firms should have a policy on confidentiality (Chait & Glied, 2018). Even though an agency might have a procedure for handling patients with communicable illnesses, in some instances, workers might contract the disease. Sara’s case is a good example showing how an employee can acquire an illness while at work. The confidentiality policy should protect such workers to avoid the dissemination of their information without their consent. Besides, sharing patients’ medical data can contribute to stigmatization and discrimination. The policy should enable such individuals to get assistance from their employer so that they can get appropriate treatment. When sick employees are undergoing treatment, the organization should not cut their salaries since it was not their wish to become ill. Instead, they need to be highly commended for risking their lives for the benefit of others. HIPAA provides the provision for safeguarding patients’ data security and privacy. On that note, health organizations are required to take the most appropriate measures to ensure that medical profiles in their electronic health records (EHRs) are safe. Health agencies should have internal policies guiding them to meet the HIPAA requirements. In the confidentiality policy, workers should be restricted from sharing usernames and passwords without permission from respective top officials (Dogra, 2018). Moreover, every employee should lock their computers or other electronic gadgets that one uses at work when unavailable. The system should not be left logged in while a person is taking a break or responding to a call of nature. Patients’ data should not be shared outside the EHR system. Before transferring a sick individual’s data to other parties, the health organization should contact the owner and ask for permission. Overall, healthcare professionals should not use real names of patients when recording data on EHR. Instea...