Confidentiality and Disclosure of Health Information Toolkit
About this tool kit Questions about confidentiality and disclosure of health care information are a significant area of ethical enquiry for the British Medical Association (BMA) and the volume of queries exceeds other issues of ethical concern raised by BMA members.While health professionals are aware of theirtraditional obligations to protect confidentiality, they also recognise that ever more complex dilemmas arise from that duty. Queries around confidentiality and disclosure are becoming more complicated.There is an ever growing list of demands on health professionals to disclose information to third parties such as insurers, the police, social workers, the DVLA and the relatives of deceased patients. There is also growing concern over the implications of increased access to patient information by electronic means and the use of patient information for secondary uses such as audit, commissioning, payment by results, research and teaching.
