Anonymisation and confidentiality

What can identify someone

Identifying information is not only names. Watch for combinations of:

• Dates, shifts or times, and specific locations (ward, school, team, hospital, clinic).
• Job titles or roles, especially where few people hold them.
• Ages, particularly exact ages of children, or unusual age-plus-condition combinations.
• Rare conditions, rare events, or distinctive circumstances.
• Bed numbers, case numbers, room numbers, or other reference details.
• Your own identifying details, which can locate everyone else by association.

The data-protection point is that anonymisation has to be judged on the whole picture. UK guidance and the Information Commissioner's Office treat information as identifying if a person could be singled out from it, directly or indirectly — so stripping the name while leaving the rest is not anonymisation.

How to write about people safely

• Refer to people by role, not name: "a patient", "my practice supervisor", "a colleague", "a pupil".
• Generalise specifics: "an older adult" rather than an exact age; "a long-term condition" rather than a rare named one, unless the condition is essential and cannot identify.
• Remove dates, shifts, bed and case numbers, and place names unless genuinely necessary.
• Keep the focus on your learning and actions, which rarely need identifying detail to make sense.
• If a detail is essential to the reflection but identifying, consider whether you can reflect on the same learning using a less specific framing.

Professional context

In nursing, the NMC requires reflective accounts for revalidation to be written so that no patient, service user, colleague or other person can be identified. In medicine, UK guidance from the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and others is clear that reflective notes should be anonymised as far as possible and should focus on learning rather than a blow-by-blow record. Across professions, the principle is the same: reflect openly about yourself, protect everyone else.