Reply to Care manager at children’s shared details of child’s ER visit with school

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Reply to " Care manager at children’s shared details of child’s ER visit with school"

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[quote=Anonymous]OP here...I appreciate the different perspectives, but for us, this really did feel like an unnecessary invasion of our child's privacy, so I followed up with the hospital to get clarification.

The first person I spoke with was one of the directors of nursing and she was quite surprised when I explained what happened. I then spoke with someone in the ombudsman's office, and that person too was surprised. Both of those people agreed that what I was describing should not have happened and said they would follow up with the legal department and have them reach out to me.

Last week someone contacted me. She wasn't from the legal department though...she said she asked the legal department to hold off in contacting me because she wanted to speak to me first as her department was directly involved with the nature of my concern. The school nurses in DC Public/Charter Schools are employed by Children's...that I was aware of, but there is another team of nurses (I think they're called care managers, community nurse managers, or something) that work to make sure kids who are seen in the ER get the follow-up care they need. Apparently, this team of nurses gets a list of all DCPS kids who were seen in the ER the previous day and reaches out to the nurses at their respective schools to give them info on the child's ER visit and any other relevant details on observation, follow-up, etc.

I asked her who the gatekeeper was to this process...like, who was responsible for reviewing and taking in to consideration the necessity or appropriateness of sharing the reason for a child's condition/ER visit with a school nurse, but she said there wasn't anyone to do that. So its a blanket policy, but I asked...what if its a sensitive medical condition that the child or the parents don't want to share...cancer, reproductive health issues, medically necessary cosmetic surgery, etc, and she couldn't see that there was a difference between the ER/care mgr nurses having access to that info and the school nurse having access to that info. She said it wasnt like anyone else at the school would see the info...it would only be available to the school nurse...not other students, not teachers or counselors...just the school nurse. I did explain it to her from a parental perspective...that with the info being there on the school premises there would always be a possibility that it could be accessed by someone other than the nurse, but the fact that I had to explain this (for me at least), was an issue in itself.

I guess I was so caught off guard because we've been to the ER dozens of times with each of our kids and were never contacted by the school nurse after a visit until now. I was also concerned because neither myself nor my husband gave consent or had knowledge that any information about our child would be shared, so when I got the phone call it felt very intrusive. On that note, this person said that there's a line in the ER reg/consent forms that mentions this, but I didn't recall seeing it (not disputing it was there, I just don't recall seeing it). She assured me it was there, but that there was no "opt out" box for parents who weren't in favor of the sharing option....which is something she agreed they may need to fix. However, she also said that I was the first parent to take issue with this policy..I was surprised by this..and actually thought it was a bit unbelievable, so I just wanted to get input from other parents.

It didn't help that the school nurse was adamant that she was entitled to the information and said it was necessary that she had it in case she ever needed to treat our child for the same issue (very unlikely that this would ever happen with the issue we had). It also bothered me that she conflated an instance of something with an actual diagnosis of something...for example, because I have 1 elevated blood pressure at a drs appt, it doesn't mean that I get a diagnosis of high blood pressure. She kept going on and on about my child's "new diagnosis" when no new diagnosis existed. [/quote]

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