Lufthansa Germanwings airplane crash, scary and sad

[RICHARD]

There are some medical conditions which should be an immediate bar to performing certain jobs and activities. Someone dealing with depression SHOULD NOT be in charge of the lives of hundreds of others. Just because someone wants to do something doesn't mean that they should be able to do it. There are qualifiers for everything, and those qualifiers should be more strenuous when dealing with the safety of others.

Reality isn't the warm fuzzy we wish it was.

Well, here is where warm fuzzy meets the reality of health/mental health care?

Here comes the rub....

There should be a system in place to monitor people who are in charge of transportation....Air/rail/road.

Now, how and what will that system look like, who will be in charge and what will the people affected think about it?

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Health records are pretty personal and I have mixed feelings about them being used as a measuring stick.....I agree that some plan should be in place, but how much info should be made available to employers and how will it be used?

One thing that I learned about working in health care is that when people are motivated to look into a clinical/hospital record, they have access to it all - Remember the Octo-Mom?

She delivered her kids at a facility that was part of the HMO that I worked for. After the births, people began to access her inpatient records and a whole slew of people were let go because of their 'curiosity'. Not a good deal.

The other hitch is the electric medical record movement here in the US..... That means that your medical records are now available, on-line.


This is going to be a tough sell here in America.

[Catty1]

RICHARD, one measuring stick might be, in this case, that the doc would be required to report to the employer that a certain employee had a note from her/him that exempted them from working that day - or whatever period of time the doc determined.

I suggest this should be mandatory when the safety and well-being of the patient and anyone else may be affected.

I have read that this person very badly feared that he would never get to be a long-haul pilot with an airline - I guess one has to have a certain number of hours? So he wouldn't even call in sick and destroyed his medical exemption notes.

Dishonest and very sick - not a good combo in any situation and particularly not in this one.

[Lady's Human]

Well, here is where warm fuzzy meets the reality of health/mental health care?

Here comes the rub....

There should be a system in place to monitor people who are in charge of transportation....Air/rail/road.

Now, how and what will that system look like, who will be in charge and what will the people affected think about it?

--------------

Health records are pretty personal and I have mixed feelings about them being used as a measuring stick.....I agree that some plan should be in place, but how much info should be made available to employers and how will it be used?

One thing that I learned about working in health care is that when people are motivated to look into a clinical/hospital record, they have access to it all - Remember the Octo-Mom?

She delivered her kids at a facility that was part of the HMO that I worked for. After the births, people began to access her inpatient records and a whole slew of people were let go because of their 'curiosity'. Not a good deal.

The other hitch is the electric medical record movement here in the US..... That means that your medical records are now available, on-line.


This is going to be a tough sell here in America.

HIPPA makes any employer reporting impossible, and needs to change.

HIPPA was well intentioned, but makes things a nightmare. I can't check on an insurance bill for my wife or children. Mental health records in particular are sacrosanct, while they should be part of a screening for many jobs, not just transportation.

Using celebrity health record snooping as an example is something of a red herring, that's going to happen regardless. It's human nature. Celebrity comes with a price. As to online med records access? They can be made incredibly secure, actually more secure than paper, because you can't just walk over to the file stack to look.

[RICHARD]

HIPPA makes any employer reporting impossible, and needs to change.

HIPPA was well intentioned, but makes things a nightmare. I can't check on an insurance bill for my wife or children. Mental health records in particular are sacrosanct, while they should be part of a screening for many jobs, not just transportation.

Using celebrity health record snooping as an example is something of a red herring, that's going to happen regardless. It's human nature. Celebrity comes with a price. As to online med records access? They can be made incredibly secure, actually more secure than paper, because you can't just walk over to the file stack to look.

Understood.

Sharing PWs is still a problem, so are people who walk away from a hot terminal. Lost PDA's and docs who give a PW to a nurse were something that our work groups looked at - more common that you'd expect.

One interesting thing that I read about 'secure' EMRs was the line that went something, 'Now, from the comfort of my couch, I can access information that I used to have to rummage thru a records room to get....'

The 'latest' online EMR scam are hackers that are taking info and using it to bill medicare for meds and equipment.......