Patient information: confidentiality and the electronic record

Abstract

The rise of the electronic record now allows nurses to access a large archive of patient information that was more difficult to obtain when records consisted of manually held paper files. There have been several instances where curiosity and, occasionally, more malicious motivations have led nurses to access these records and read the notes of a celebrity or a person they know. In this article, Richard Griffith considers whether nurses' accessing and reading of the record of someone who is not in their care is in breach of their duty of confidentiality.