The Arrest of a Nurse in Utah and Relevant Laws

摘要

ON JULY 26, 2017, Alex Wubbels, a nurse in the burn unit at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, was arrested in an incident that has since been viewed widely on video captured from police body cameras. She refused to let a police phlebotomist draw blood from a patient in a coma—one of the parties involved in a fatal automobile crash. Besides being difficult to watch, this incident demonstrated the lack of understanding of two laws: one Utah state law and one of the tenets of the HIPAA Privacy Rule called "preemption.".