Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ucla-cs!HAMER%VCUVAX.BITNET@oac.ucla.edu
From: HAMER%VCUVAX.BITNET@oac.ucla.edu (ROBERT M. HAMER)
Newsgroups: sci.med.aids
Subject: Re: HIV Status Policy
Message-ID: <38166@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 17 Aug 90 20:47:00 GMT
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Approved: ddodell@stjhmc.fidonet.org (David Dodell)
Note:	Copyright 1990 by Daniel R. Greening.  Permission granted for
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Archive-number: 2388

Annoyed.As.Hell@p0.f69.n154.z1.fidonet.org (Annoyed As Hell) writes:

>30 seconds after we sat down in the waiting room, the receptionist called into
>patient admitting, and, in a regular voice audible throughout the waiting room
>o any and all others present "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome-Peunomonia."

First, the receptionist should never have, in a "regular voice audible
throughout the waiting room to any and all others present," made a
statement about your friends condition, complaint, or problem.  That
is a clear violation of anybody's idea of confidentiality.  You should
write a letter of protest.  In all honesty, however, the letter will
probablly wind up in the wastebasket.

Now, on to your second objection:

>Additionally, his room has in big black and white letters "Blood & Secretion
>Precautions" for all to see, including visitors and other patients on the
>entire floor!

>Isn't there some way Doctors, Nurses, and Medical Professionals could refer to
>these patients and this diagnosis, without alarming everyone else within

I would assert that the BIG, "Blood and Secretion Precautions" sign on
his room is functional and necessary.  Everyone, from physicians, nurses,
janitors, etc, _and_ visitors, need to be aware that they need to take
special precautions.  People involved in direct medical intervention need
to be aware of the possibility of needle sticks, burst specimen containers,
etc.  They need to know that they need to be especially to be sure to take
all the precautions they are supposed to be taking anyway.  The janitors
need to be aware that if they are moping up vomit they need to be careful
about how they treat it.  (Footnote:  we all know no one is going to catch
HIV from vomit, at least not unless one eats large quantities of it, but
the regs and procedures demand that it be treated appropriately.)
Visitors need to know so that they can take appropriate pracautions
themselves, and more importantly, so that they are careful not to
potentially infect an immune-impaired patient.

I know it is not fun; I know hospitals are dehumanizing, impersonal,
insensitive, often degrading places, but it is pretty much that way
for everyone, not just HIV infected folks.  People with many other
infectious diseases have the same signs on the doors.  Some of those
diseases may be transmitted by vomit far more easily than HIV disease.

>earshot?  Couldn't a code, or number, or even a red piece of tape on the
>patients door be used to alert medical personnal of precautionary conditions?

The precautions aren't and shouldn't be coded.  They should be plain and
obvious.  Everyone who works in that environment needs to be reminded of
them so they don't slacken up.

>I cannot tell you how many times I have sat in the doctors office of a major
>physician here in town (with numerous AIDS patients) while names, conditions,
>symptoms or tests (Such as T-cell counts) are spoken of freely and openly.

Wrong, unfortunate, and there is probably not much we can do about it.

>WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO THE CONFIDENTIALITY THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE
>ASSURED FOR THESE PATIENTS BY LAW

In a medical environment, confidentiality is a joke.  The physicians,
nurses, typists, secretaries, clerks, insurance folks down at BC/BS
and medicaid, etc, all know about your friend and are within whatever
he signed when he got hospitalized that said essentially that the
hospital was free to release any information to anyone who had a
reasonable need to it for financial or insurance purposes.  Any
clerk who knows the procedures can walk into medical records and
fill out a form requesting a patient's chart, and get it.  (Of
course, if it is like our medical records, half the charts are lost
anyway...)  Any physician, unconnected with your friend's care,
can get any chart for "research" purposes.  And his/her secretary.
And his/her students.  Etc.

>Or is it that I am just one of the few people intelligent enough to know what
>a Doctor or Nurse is talking about?

Probably.  Most people probably think HIV disease is something only
homosexuals get, or, conversely, that you can catch it from bug-bites.
I have met physicians with the most illogical and unknowledgable
beliefs about HIV.

>Is there any other way hospitals or clinics in other areas refer to AIDS
>patients, without "disclosing" his/her condition (illegally, I might add).  If

In many hospitals, for valid reasons, HIV patients reside on HIV wards.
By definition, if you on that unit, everyone in the hospital knows that's
what you've got.  That may be unfortunate, but it makes better treatment
sense to have similarly-troubled people grouped in a place where you can
group people trained to help them.  That's why the heart attack patients
are grouped together; the kids are grouped together; etc.