Personal statement privacy laws

[PooshBag]

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Hello,

I have been a hospice volunteer for some time now. I will be applying this current cycle that just opened up a few days ago. I was drafting my personal statement, and decided i wanted it to include interactions I had with one particular patient that I was assigned in the past.

My question is if any/all of the following information is too much to include in my personal statement, on fear of privacy laws? (privacy laws not limited to only HIPAA)

-First name (He has a generic first name, or I should just refer to him as 'my patient')
-His symptoms/diseases/reasons for being in hospice
-His date of death
-Perhaps some details on some very close and personal discussions we had (suicide/depression/religion/etc)
-Mentioning (but not fully detailing or explaining) some life events, such divorces/suicides/deaths/etc.

Any and all insight is appreciated. Thank you.

 

[gyngyn]

If he is potentially identifiable by any information you provide, you are in violation.
Do not provide date of death.
Rare conditions also make people identifiable, as well as advanced age.

 

[PooshBag]

Alright. So no date of death. Nothing rare either. He had lung cancer, which isnt too rare, i think. No use of names either. In essence, keep things not identifiable in absolutely any means. That works.

I wanted an extra opinion on the matter, because my pre-health advisor initially told me that all of that stuff was fine, and that i could even use his name, while other people said the opposite.

Thanks for the advice!

 

[LizzyM]

Give him a pseudonym like "Al" or "Tom" or "Don" or "Jim" (minimal characters). Putting it in quotes suggests it is not his real name without wasting characters. Lung Cancer kills more than 86,000 men per year so you are pretty safe there.

Don't go into too many details. Strange things can happen. I would imagine you will list the name of the hospice you volunteered with. Now imagine that someone whose father, uncle, cousin, old friend, died in that hospice of lung cancer during the period you were volunteering and in reading this essay they recognize the person they loved.

This happened to a friend of mine... someone who had been a volunteer at her kid's school wrote about the kid by name.... between the time the PS was submitted and the application was read, the kid, who was disabled, died! Very tragic and then very bittersweet for the parent to see the kid's name in print.

Don't make this about "Don", make it about you. What were you feeling as you heard him talk about his life, the bumps in the road, the peaks and valleys. If you just refer to things that way, no one is going to really feel like you are telling "Don's" secrets.

 

[PooshBag]

Ah yes! That is a solid point. The PS is about me, and therefore should not even go into so much detail about him, but more how it impacted me. That is very helpful. Thank you.