Confidentiality during staff reports at the bedside.

This paper describes a small-scale qualitative study in an acute elderly care setting using the bedside approach to nursing hand-over reporting. The aim of the study was to examine the attitudes of staff and patients while conducting bedside reporting instead of a more traditional approach to report-giving. The main focus was to examine attitudes to confidentiality, the outcome of which concludes that the nursing staff perceived less maintenance of confidentiality than patients believed they had experienced.