The confidentiality of medical records is threatened by government plans to relax laws on data protection, doctors' leaders told the Guardian yesterday. Dr Hamish Meldrum, chairman of the British Medical Association, said the profession was "extremely concerned" about legislation tabled by Jack Straw, the justice secretary, which would allow the Department of Health to share information on NHS databases with other ministries and private companies.
The purpose of oral presentations in rounds is to tell the patient’s story. The narrative helps the healthcare team make sense of the patient’s situation and provide safe, effective care. Although the stories should be comprehensive, they are often incomplete. The ethical aspects are omitted. At present the healthcare team has to tease these out from a heap of medical information. Sometimes the ethical issues stay buried in the heap, unnoticed. To reduce the risk of the clinical obscuring the ethical, a new section is needed in patients’ notes. The new category, named "ethical issues," would consist of a short list of headings. It would not require much time to complete, nor would it require much knowledge of medical ethics. It would make explicit the key ethical issues of a case, helping to anticipate their emergence or aggravation. The team can then implement strategies to deal with them.
GPs’ representatives voted overwhelmingly this week for a system in which patients opt in to any sharing of medical data with third parties—rather than one in which their consent is assumed unless they opt out, the system favoured by the Department of Health. Clinical confidentiality depends on GPs being the prime data holder of their patients’ medical records, said the BMA’s annual conference of local medical committee representatives in London. It also strongly opposed using implied consent as justification for releasing information on named patients.
Doctors are being warned not to respond to flirtatious approaches on social networking sites. The Medical Defence Union, a legal body for doctors, said communicating via sites such as Facebook may be a breach of ethical responsibilities. It issued the warning after a number of cases in which patients propositioned doctors after searching for their details on the internet. Regulators agreed that medics should be careful.
GPs are considering whether to abandon their involvement in a scheme to put medical records on a computer database. BBC News understands that talks are continuing to try to make it easier for patients to opt out of the system. Thirty million people in England have already been formally contacted about the computer record. Health ministers from the coalition government insist the rollout will continue.