Beware: Doctors Talk about You on Facebook and Twitter
A new survey conducted by a group of medical schools in the US has raised a new debate about the doctor-patient confidentiality policy of hospitals following a finding that more than 60 percent of respondents post about their patients’ condition on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.
Based on the survey, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, some 13 percent of the hospitals said that they have reported several cases of violation of the patient-doctor confidentiality policy.
While some 60 percent of the respondents said that their doctors have posted several contents online, which constitute to violation of the right of privacy of their patients.
The report also said that most violations were committed by young medical students, who even went all-out on their posts to the point where the patients could be identified by someone who also know them.
These postings range from the patients’ problem with alcohol, obesity, drug abuse, etc.
Another extreme case involves a student doctor who’s proposing a somewhat inappropriate relationship with one of his female patients.
The respondents to the survey were deans from various medical schools all over the US. The school heads, however, refused to reveal their names to protect their schools from critics.
The deans, based on the report, stressed that violations of confidentiality between doctors and patients are much higher than what people usually think.
Despite rare reports about such incidents, the deans said that it is due to the fact the patients did not bother to make an official complaint about it and just go one with their lives.
Even in Youtube, more and more unethical practices are being posted. An example of which is a video footage taken by a student using his phone’s camera showing medical students playing with a dead body.
Another example of unethical practice is a video footage showing that another group of medical students playing with patient’s silicon transplant while she’s undergoing medical operations.
According to the report, less than seven percent of the perpetrators were expelled while 62 percent of the schools included in the reports don’t even have policies on how students should behave in their social networking accounts.
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