Confidentiality and truth-telling
Confidentiality and its limits, truthfulness, breaking bad news and disclosing medical error.
11 pages
Procedure
- Breaking bad news: the SPIKES protocolSPIKES puts giving bad news into six steps: prepare, explore, ask, inform, respond to emotion…
- Medical error: disclosure and apologyWhen an error affects the patient, the doctor tells them honestly, explains what happened…
Topic
- Fidelity and dual loyaltyDual loyalty arises when a doctor serves the patient and, at the same time, a third party such…
- Genetic information: testing, confidentiality and relativesA genetic result also speaks about relatives: it calls for consent and counselling, and for…
- Honesty with third parties: insurers, certificates and billingDoctors do not lie on the patient's behalf: a certificate, a report to an insurer or a bill must…
- The limits of confidentiality: duty to warn and legal disclosureSecrecy gives way when there is a serious risk to an identifiable person or when a law requires…
- Therapeutic privilege and the right not to knowRarely, a doctor may withhold information if telling it would cause serious harm; and a patient…
- When the doctor is also the investigatorA doctor doing research with their own patients serves two ends, the patient's good and…
Principle
- Privacy and habeas data in healthPrivacy protects the patient's body, information and decisions; in Colombia it is guaranteed by…
- Professional secrecy and confidentialityThe doctor keeps private everything learned about the patient through work, except the…
- Truthfulness: telling the patient the truthPatients have a right to know the truth about their health, told with tact and at the pace they…
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← Medical ethics and health law
Educational content on ethics and health law; not legal advice. Laws and case law change: each page links the official text and says when it was last checked. For a real case, read the text in force and ask a lawyer or the medical ethics tribunal.
Representative model, for educational purposes only.