There are some dangers inherent about blogging, especially about matters that should be kept confidential.

An appeals court recently upheld the University of Louisville’s dismissal of a nursing student for blogging about a patient. Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed has the details:

Students say plenty online that their professors might find unprofessional, offensive or irresponsible. And in most cases, if students are at a public institution and they are using social media platforms that aren’t connected to their colleges, the First Amendment protects those Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.

But a new federal appeals court ruling is part of a trend in which courts are permitting limits on students’ social media use (and punishment for violations) in fields in which part of the instruction is training in professional ethics (especially in the health professions) that include confidentiality obligations.

In this case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has ruled that the University of Louisville had the right to dismiss a nursing student who blogged about a patient’s experience giving birth. Further, the court found that this action by the university was academic in nature, as the university argued, and not disciplinary, as the student argued. The distinction is important because students are entitled to considerably more due process for disciplinary dismissals at public institutions than they are for academic dismissals.

Nina Yoder sued Louisville when she was dismissed from the nursing program in 2009. In a sign of how long this case has been in the courts, her blogging platform was MySpace. While there have already been several rulings in the case as it has moved between district and appeals courts, the new findings focus directly on First Amendment issues. Yoder claimed that she had a First Amendment right to share her reflections on a pregnant woman she observed as part of her training, and she also asserted that pledges she signed to honor patient confidentiality were themselves unconstitutional. But the appeals court rejected those arguments. Yoder also gave the pregnant woman a release form in which Yoder pledged to use the patient’s experiences “only for written/oral assignments.”

…[T]he blog post also described specific medical procedures witnessed on an individual who had consented only to be observed for Yoder’s classwork. The blog described the mother receiving an epidural, the reaction of the father to parts of the process, the mother throwing up at one point, and the eventual arrival of a healthy baby girl, whom Yoder called “The Creep.”