Student nurses’ views regarding disclosure of patients’ confidential information

Background: Nurses have a moral duty to maintain the confidentiality of patients’ information. Challenges to maintaining confidentiality often arise because of competing moral claims of the patient, his/her family members and doctors.Methods: A qualitative, descriptive and contextual study was conducted to explore and describe the views of student nurses regarding the disclosure of patients’ information. Sampling to select 17 student nurses in their final year of nursing training was adopted purposefully. Data were collected by means of focus group and individual interviews, and then analysed using the Tesch descriptive analysis method.Results: Two themes emerged from analysis of the data, reflecting the participants’ views regarding the disclosure of confidential patient information. The themes were: maintaining the confidentiality of patients’ information, and factors influencing the disclosure of information.Conclusions: The findings indicate that student nurses are aware of the challenges inherent in practice, where patients’ confidentiality might sometimes be compromised

Barriers to the successful implementation of school health services in the Mpumalanga and Gauteng provinces

Background: The level of development of a country is measured by the health status of its children. The higher the mortality and morbidity rates in children, the more the country is challenged to improve its health care system. Although South Africa accepted the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in 1996 thereby committing itself to prioritisation of children, the implementation of school health services in South Africa has deteriorated to levels that contravene these rights. The promotion of health in schools requires a strong political commitment that will influence all levels of policy making, in other words national, provincial and local, towards an integrated and coordinated school health programme. Methods: A qualitative, explorative and descriptive study was conducted to identify barriers that led to poor implementation and a decline of school health services in the Mpumalanga and Gauteng provinces. The data-collection method of choice for this study was focus group discussions, which were conducted with all intersectoral role-players involved in school health programmes. To ensure broad representation of the various stakeholders, 10 participants were selected from five districts in each of the two provinces. This resulted in 50 participants per province. Results: The study findings reveal the following as barriers that hamper successful implementation of comprehensive school health programmes:• Barriers related to governance, for example lack of national policy guidelines for school health services and failure of government to prioritise school health services                                                                          • Programme-related issues, such as lack of intersectoral collaboration and unrealistic nurse–learner ratios• Management-related issues, such as lack of support by management and managers’ limited knowledge of the Healthpromoting Schools Initiative• Community-related issues, such as health professionals not including the communities in school health programmesConclusions: The need for political commitment in consistently placing the health and education of learners as a priority on the national agenda cannot be over-emphasised. Having adopted the CRC, South Africa took a giant step towards the prioritisation of child protection and care issues. This commitment can only be achieved through conscious intersectoral efforts that will promote a spirit of working together and sharing scarce resources towards one common goal.Keywords: school health services; health-promoting schools; health care policy; Prim ary Health Care Model; barrier

A business model to overcome barriers to entry in the South African downstream petroleum industry

The South African downstream petroleum industry was in the hands of Whites and Multinational Oil Companies during the apartheid era. Many Historically Disadvantaged South Africans (HDSA’s) were excluded from the mainstream industry through, among other instruments, laws passed by the government such as the Petroleum Products Act 120 of 1977. Against this background, the newly elected democratic government instituted a policy process aimed at restructuring and transforming the petroleum industry to allow HDSA’s to enter the industry, in order to achieve sustainable presence, ownership and control of approximately a quarter of the industry by previously disadvantaged individuals. Since the introduction of this process, which culminated in the release of the White Paper on the Energy Policy of the Republic of South Africa (1998), little progress has been made towards achieving this government’s key policy objective. Instead, there is still little entry into the industry by HDSA’s, and the Black Oil Companies (BOC’s) that are in the industry continue to struggle to increase their market share. This paper discusses the possible constraints on achieving the objective, by looking at barriers that impede HDSA’s from entering the industry and BOC’s from increasing their market share significantly. There are three possible categories of barriers in the downstream petroleum industry, namely, economic barriers to entry, noneconomic barriers, and cross-sectoral barriers to entry, which are discussed in this paper. These categories of barriers prevent entry by HDSA’s into the industry and hinder BOC’s from increasing their market share. To circumvent these barriers, and in order to make progress towards achieving the government’s key policy objective of control by approximately a quarter of the HDSA’s, a black economic empowerment model was developed. This model seeks to increase the market share of the BOC’s and the presence of the HDSA’s in the industry in a sustainable way without significantly harming the multinational oil companies. It foresees Government licensing BOC’s to purchase up to 5% of the existing South African fuel demand at an Import Parity Price (IPP) that is significantly less than the Basic Fuel Price (BFP). The reason for this difference is that the BFP is based upon the supply of the totality of South Africa’s needs from elsewhere, whereas the IPP merely supplies up to 5% of South Africa’s needs, and can therefore source the product from refineries that are closer, so reducing the transport component. The impact of the loss of 5% of the internal market for petrol and diesel on the revenues of the MOC’s is less than 0.5%, because the difference between the IPP and BFP is a small fraction of the BFP

Human rights education in patient care

Abstract This article explores how human rights education in the health professions can build knowledge, change culture, and empower advocacy. Through a study of educational initiatives in the field, the article analyzes different methods by which health professionals come to see the relevance of human rights norms for their work, to habituate these norms in everyday practice, and to espouse these norms in advocacy for social justice. The article seeks to show the transformative potential of education for human rights in patient care