Patient privacy protection among university nursing students: A cross-sectional study

BACKGROUND: Protecting a person's right to privacy and confidentiality is important in healthcare services. As future health professionals, nursing students should bear the same responsibility as qualified health professionals in protecting patient privacy. OBJECTIVES: To investigate nursing students' practices of patient privacy protection and to identify factors associated with their practices. RESEARCH DESIGN: A cross-sectional study design was adopted. A two-part survey was used to collect two types of data on nursing students: (1) personal characteristics, including demographics, clinical experience and use of information and communication technology and social media and (2) practice of patient privacy protection, collected using the Patient Privacy Scale. PARTICIPANTS AND RESEARCH CONTEXT: A total of 319 nursing students aged 18 or above, studying pre-registration nursing programmes and who had attended at least one block of clinical placement, were recruited from a university in Hong Kong. ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS: The study received ethical approval from the Survey and Behavioural Research Ethics Committee of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The participants were informed of the study aim and written consent was obtained before completing the survey. FINDINGS: The mean total score on the Patient Privacy Scale was 119.7 out of 135. Nursing students who were regular users of Instagram and those who had never taken photographs with patients and hence did not need to obtain patient consent were associated with better practices of patient privacy protection (higher total scores on the Patient Privacy Scale). CONCLUSIONS: The findings improve our understanding of nursing students' practice of patient privacy protection and the associated factors. This will inform the development and revision of current strategies to enhance nursing students' practice of patient privacy protection, especially their use of social media.