AHS drops disciplinary action against UNA employees
Posted Jan 15, 2016 11:33 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Alberta Health Services has dropped disciplinary actions against 24 employees at the South Health Campus hospital.
The United Nurses of Alberta union was fighting claims that the emergency workers accessed a patient’s files inappropriately.
The records in question belonged to Christine Hagan, a woman who was battling pancreatic cancer.
Hagan passed away late last year, but police later said she caused her daughter’s fatal overdose.
David Harrigan, the UNA’s director of labour relations, said this was the expected outcome.
“The reality was, there were no breaches in privacy,” he said. “The nurses in question were just doing their job. They weren’t just out of morbid curiosity rummaging through peoples’ personal records. My understanding is that the employer is going to do some further education and policy-making with regards to privacy and when it’s appropriate to access files and when it isn’t.”
He added, the way this situation was handled was completely inappropriate, and should have been done in a confidential matter. The union took issue with former AHS CEO Vickie Kaminski after names of the employees in question were included in a public news release.
“I’ve been in this business for more than 30 years. This is the first time I’ve ever known an employer to issue a news release to indicate they were disciplining employees, and then to make it clear who the employees were,” he said. “At the time, we suggested the only appropriate thing would be for Ms. Kaminski to resign, and since then she has. So we’re pleased, and we’re prepared to leave it at that.”
Kaminski cited personal reasons behind her resignation.
