Stationery stockout jeopardises patient confidentiality
The clinic, which is situated within the property of Kuruman’s main government hospital, services township areas such as Wrenchville and Promised Land, offering health services such as HIV testing and counselling, TB treatment and other chronic illness treatment and general wellness services.
But for the past six months, the clinic has been regularly running out of patient files, according to staff members who asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorised to speak to the media. They claim the matter has been reported to the district office, but there has been no response.
Suddenly stopped
In the past, the files were received from the Northern Cape Department of Health offices in Kimberley, without orders even having to be placed. But that service has suddenly stopped, a staff member said.
In order to maintain patient confidentiality, admin staff started using the covers torn off old school exercise books in order to cover patient files in order to keep information hidden.
“Issuing a patient’s record without a file cover compromises the quality of their confidentiality,” explained one of the staff members.
Sylvia Leabile, President of Phenomenal African Women (PAW) in the Northern Cape, has offered to sponsor the clinic with files if they are given permission to do so.
Should it be allowed, PAW will partner with the DoH and campaign to raise funds towards the file covers,” said Leabile.
Right to confidentiality
One of the clinic patients said she had a right to confidentiality and it was the Department of Health’s responsibility to protect the content of their files in such a way as to avoid other patients reading or viewing the information – one of the dictates of South Africa’s Patient Rights Charter.
Another patient, Angeline Moremedi, said that before the clinic introduced the system of keeping all patient files at the clinic, patients used to have their own booklet detailing their history. Their visits were recorded in the booklet which the patients kept with them and would bring with to their clinic visits.
“If we were allowed to take our files home, we could see to it that they were properly covered and protected ourselves,” Moremedi said.
Health-e News contacted the Northern Cape DoH’s communication officer for comment, and she is still waiting for approval from her seniors to respond. Further efforts to reach the DoH by Health-e have been unsuccessful. – Health-e News.
Author
-
Mpho Lekgetho is our citizen journalists based in Kuruman at the John Taolo Gaetsewe District in the Northern Cape. She has a qualification in Industrial Psychology from Unisa. Mpho is a former radio presenter at Kurara community radio station. She is currently working as a data collector for HSRC and is also a chairperson of the JTG Civil Society Forum and co-chairs District Aids Council.
View all posts
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Stationery stockout jeopardises patient confidentiality
by Mpho Lekgetho, Health-e News
February 20, 2019