Advocating for child safety

Several years ago, Donna La Scala faced every parent’s worst nightmare. Her daughter, Alexandra, then 18 and a recent graduate of W.T. Clarke High School, was hospitalized with a severe allergic reaction while away at college.

When La Scala called the hospital, she recalled, she was told that officials could not legally provide information on her daughter’s condition because her privacy was protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which requires patients who are 18 or older to give their consent for anyone — including parents or guardians — to receive medical information.

It was a stark contrast to a year earlier, when Alexandra, then 17, had been hospitalized with an allergic reaction, and EMTs were on the phone with Donna the entire time, she said.

Alexandra is now 25 and healthy, but the experience of being in the dark was a terrifying one for her mother. “It’s a feeling of such powerlessness,” Donna recalled. “I don’t want anyone to have to go through what I went through.”

She has since learned that the New York Health Care Proxy Law allows you to appoint someone to make health care decisions for you if you lose the ability to make those decisions for yourself, thus giving that person access to medical information in the event of an emergency.

Her experience inspired La Scala, a member of the East Meadow Parent Teacher Association Council, to make other parents aware of the HIPAA privacy rule’s implications if they have college-age children. Though it can be circumvented with a proxy form that can be found on the state Department of Health website, problems with the law, La Scala said, often don’t arise until there’s an emergency.

This year, she and the PTA Council took their work a step further. After spending the past two years researching and writing a resolution calling for the dissemination of medical privacy laws in high schools and colleges, members formally presented it at last month’s 117th annual New York State PTA Convention.

It was one of three resolutions adopted by the state PTA at the convention, and will now have the organization’s full backing moving forward.

Two years of research