Nursing Discipline - How the Bureaucracy Hurts You

The Healthcare Integrity and Protection Data Bank is a federal database that keeps track of nurses and other healthcare professionals who have been disciplined for a variety of reasons. According the website at the Department of Health and Human Services, the HIPDB was created in 1996, "to combat fraud and abuse in health insurance and health care delivery." These are very noble and lofty goals, and work to instill confidence of the general public into the hands of nurses nationwide. Certainly most nurses don't want to have to work around people who are negligent and unsafe. They also want patients to trust them. Any breech of that trust reflects poorly on the profession as a whole.

The unfortunate part of the issue is that at this time, the federal government will not provide you access to the information contained in your particular file. Suppose you were accused of something and written up in absentia. Through the court system and throughout all of labor law, you would be entitled to some course of action against the offending party. As the situation exists, you are not even privy to the knowledge that your file contains.

Under Section 1128E of the Social Security Act, "the Secretary [of HHS] will...provide for...disclosure of the information, upon request, to the health care provider, supplier, or licensed practitioner." The problem, like many things in the federal system, is that bureaucracy makes this information gathering almost completely unavailable. According to NPR, not even the hiring agencies that employ nurses, such as hospitals and nursing homes can access the database. A recent feature story says that Dr. Sidney Wolfe, CEO of the Public Citizen's Health Research Group, "notes that there are more than 102,000 nurses, nurse aides, pharmacists and pharmacy assistants who've been disciplined and included in the registry, but that hospitals and nursing homes can't check the data bank." This useful tool to protect the profession is just something else to be thrown in the trash bin of bureaucracy.