Referencing and confidentiality

You may need to refer to events, people and policies from your placement location as part of future assignments, whether these are reflections, case studies or other projects. It is important to do this ethically and in line with professional guidelines relating to confidentiality. This means that although you will be expected to reference your sources, you may need to anonymise them in your work.

Cite them right has a section on how to reference confidential information. This advice is based on theirs.

If you are required to maintain anonymity and confidentiality, do not name the organisation your placement was with. Instead, use an anonymised generalisation, such as ‘Placement hospital’, ‘Placement local authority’ or ‘Placement agency’ when you would normally use their name as part of a reference.

In-text references should look something like this:

...following the local procedures which require an enhanced infection control regime (Placement hospital, 2023).

The reference list entry might look something like this:

[Placement hospital] (2023) [Placement hospital] infection prevention and control guidelines. Kent: [Placement hospital]. Unpublished.

Note that the anonymised version of your placement location is placed in square brackets – make sure that you do not accidentally include their name in the title of the document! Even if the document is available online, do not include the URL, as that would immediately undo any efforts to anonymise the source.

It is best to put the county (or London) as the place of publication, as entering the specific town or city would often be enough to pinpoint exactly which organisation your placement was with.

If you have any doubts about whether you should anonymise references to guidelines and so on from your placement, speak to your tutor.

Find out more on the next page: Reflective journals and writing