Ethical, professional, and legal obligations in clinical practice: a series of discussion topics for postgraduate medical education - Topic 5: disclosing confidential information

This is the last discussion topic in a series of five dealing with ethical, professional, and legal obligations of clinical practice. Junior doctors tend to lack confidence in these subjects, and thus I organised a series of informal discussions in our surgical unit on which these discussion articles are based. The sessions were prepared with reference to nonacademic literature readily available from the General Medical Council and the medical defence organisations. While our unit dealt with these issues from a surgical perspective, the obligations of clinical practice apply to all practitioners and the series could be easily modified for other clinical specialties. Sometimes the principle of confidentiality conflicts with ethical, professional, and legal obligations.