Category: Hospitals

Last week the IPC issued two new decisions for health care organizations in Ontario. The first one has practical impact on group practices like family health teams. Group practices should proactively clarify who is the health information custodian  Decision 50 – This one will interest all family health teams and other group practices. It relates to… Read more »

Does your hospital explain to your Professional Staff members the rules about taking a leave of absence? Remember: Professional Staff members may include doctors, dentists, midwives and independent contractor nurse practitioners. Since members of the Professional Staff are usually independent contractors and not employees of a hospital, they independently arrange for their colleagues to cover… Read more »

The IPC has posted their new Privacy Breach Reporting Form online. This is what health care organizations will use to alert the IPC to reportable privacy breaches as described in my previous post   These requirements came into effect October 1st. Here’s a PDF version of the Privacy Breach Report Form.    

If you are a health care leader, at some point you have wondered about the risks of social media. You know you need to use social media platforms to share your organizational message. And you may want to expand what you are doing though social media in order to stay relevant with your patient population like add… Read more »

The Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario just released a new practice guideline last week to assist health care organizations to better understand their upcoming new obligations to report privacy breaches to the IPC. Here is the document: health-privacy-breach-notification-guidelines Those new obligations come into effect on October 1st. A few weeks ago, the IPC released another practice direction related to  Frivolous and… Read more »

Professional Staff in hospitals are doctors, dentists, midwives and privileged staff nurse practitioners. Does your hospital have a plan to deal with Professional Staff retirements, departures and recruitment? Do any of these scenarios sound familiar? You are worried about a future brain drain – when you look into the future, you can see the possibly of… Read more »

The Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario just released two more decisions all health care providers in Ontario should read. Decision 48: A hospital received a request for access to records. The hospital provided the complainant with a full copy of his health records but the complainant believed there should be additional records (specifically letters from… Read more »

The other day I was a pedestrian on the sidewalk waiting for the traffic light to turn green. Up rode a young guy on a bicycle – on the sidewalk. Honestly, I hadn’t noticed he was on the sidewalk.  But a woman next to me did. And she instantly tore into him. “How dare you… Read more »

Back in the 1980s and 90s, many hospitals published Medical Staff “Rules and Regulations”. And in some cases, that package then went dormant as hospital-wide policies and procedures were introduced. Have a look on your intranet. Do you have Rules and Regulations that are still on the books but have not been updated in awhile?… Read more »

I train Privacy Officers to understand their role. So, what does a Privacy Officer do for a health care organization? In Ontario, every health care organization must have a “contact person” to do the following five tasks: Facilitate compliance with the health privacy law, PHIPA Ensure that everyone who works for the organization is informed… Read more »