Participation In Clinical Trial

Confidentiality: Acknowledgement of the process of keeping trusted information private by the clinician, while distinguishing the reason for breaking one’s promise in keeping information secret; through written and verbal communication.

Confidentiality is a concept of vast importance for professionals in the medical field. It is a professional obligation in this field and is considered to be an ethical concept that falls in line with integrity, compassion, veracity, charity, and fidelity as explained in both the International Council of Nurses Code for Nurses (1973) and the American Nurses Association Code of Ethics (1985). However, in today’s ever growing world of technology and demand for information, challenges continue to arise that force doctors and nurses to reexamine virtues such as confidentiality.

The article, Keep Privacy in Health Records, was written by the Monitor's Editorial Board on February 2, 2009. It condemns some of the provisions of a House Bill that was passed by the ACLU and other privacy groups. According to this bill, data encryption would ensure that authorized persons are barred from accessing patient’s health records in the institution. Audit trails are also crucial in determining and tracking who accessed the records, at what time and what type of information did he/she get. Lastly, the patients should be allowed to see their records to improve their notification and strengthen enforcement in health institutions. However, despite these initiatives to improve accountability and confidentiality of patient’s records in most institutions, the board believes that the bill has not solved some of the privacy issues as far as patient health records are concerned.

This provides a guideline that ensures that researchers minimize the amount of risk a study may impose to a participant. When planning a study, it is also important that each of the participants are provided with a sense of security and not placed at a disadvantage. When participants enter into a study, a level of trust is established, and their identities and the information they provide must be protected and never be used against them or exploited for any reason.

Confidentiality in the Healthcare arena can be simply defined as the moral and ethical duty of the Practitioner to keep all the patient’s bio-data under lock and key, and offer a disclosure of those facts that the patient is legally mandated to disclose or deems fit to enhance their positive health outcome. According to the Segen’s Medical Dictionary, “Confidentiality is the ethical principle that a physician may not reveal any information disclosed in the course of medical care, unless the patient who disclosed that information poses a threat to him, herself or others’’

The elements of the principles of confidentiality can be broken down into four separate categories: (1) Information provided by the patient is kept confidential unless consent from the patient has otherwise been given—unless it has direct legal implications or endangers the general public. (2) Informed Consent: is given freely, because the correct information has been supplied and the patient has sufficient information on the impacts involved. Information is otherwise given out on a need to know basis. (3) Duty of Care: Information is given out in order to protect the safety and health of others and the patient. Legal and general public health fall under this category. (4) Documenting Decisions: Consultations and actions that lead to

It is essential that health care researchers and/or managers abide by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPPA) before sharing any patient health information to the public. The Privacy Rule under HIPPA will permit the sharing of health information without patient permission for payment, treating, and health care operations, and other specified purposes (Koontz, 2015). In addition, the Security Rule under HIPPA is designed to ensure that patient health information is protected from the unauthorized disclosure and access (Koontz, 2015). After all, the increase in health information technology makes it easier for researchers to obtain patient health data (Largent, Joffe, & Miller, 2011). However, the health care researcher

Confidentiality is considered a core value or principal in the medical practice. Confidentiality is a right that all people have within the medical field. This is the requirement of health care providers to keep a person’s information exclusive unless the patient or the person consents in the form of a release to share that information with other people that practice. Usually the consent is given when a doctor wants to consult with a different doctor for example. In this case it would be for the betterment of the person.

Review Ethics boards should be considerate of the patient’s they are using to conduct their research by first having them fill out an agreement to participate in the research. This idea is reinforced by a field researcher who had to get the patients to sign permission slips before interviewing them and the research wouldn’t reveal their identity. The field researcher found this was an effective way to make the patients whom the experiment is being conducted on comfortable and willing to participate. It allows the patients to have a say on whether they are willing to have specific research done on them whether related to psychological reasons such as asking questions or to have biological research

When dealing with privacy, the data protection act requires that the identity of all participants remains confidential. As well as safeguarding privacy there is an obvious practical benefit from this approach. Participants are unlikely to volunteer for procedures if they believe that their identity and behaviour will be divulged. There were clear breaches of confidentiality in the Milgram and Zimbardo studies as in both cases participants were secretly filmed. Guidelines require that participants are not identified unless they give their permission and various methods may be used to disguise their identity. For example in case studies patients may be identified only by their initials such as KF or HM.

The argument of whether or not medical confidentiality needs to be absolute or not sparks necessary discussions among doctors and ethicists. M. A. Crook addresses this issue in his article, The Risks of Absolute Medical Confidentiality, which discusses the holes in the argument that patient confidentiality should always be up kept. Crook presents detailed examples of scenarios in which confidentiality should have been broken, provides credible sources to support his opinion, and compares his points to other significant issues. Certain aspects of Crook’s argument enable it to be an overall well-written and persuasive article.

It is of utmost importance that ethical standards are overseen by a governing body like the Institutional Review Board (IRB) to hold researchers to ethical standards (Smith & Davis, 2010). The researchers of this study did have the approval process from the IRB. All the names were changed as a safeguard in this study as well on the final data collection so as not to violate anyone’s privacy. This could also be seen as another strength to the study giving no one a reason to lie.

In this paper, I will discuss the principles that permit disclosure of protected health information with or without the patient’s consent for each of the four categories, government agencies, legal agencies or representatives and research groups. I will also state whether I feel privacy safeguards are adequate to support those principles.

Knowing the difference between privacy and confidentiality can be confusing. Privacy is the right of individuals to keep information about themselves from being disclosed; that is, people (our patients) are in control of others access to themselves or information about themselves. Patients decide who, when, and where to

I’ve learned that it’s not necessarily what we find out from research but, where we gathered the information. We should be careful with how we find out information. With all information gathered, we must also gather participants. It is essential that those whom take on the role of scientific researcher of psychology that the guidelines of the American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct be followed (Cozby & Bates, 2015, p. 47). Confidentiality and privacy is very important within research. Confidentiality is an issue when a researcher has assured subjects that the collected data are only accessible to people with permission, generally only the researcher (Cozby & Bates, 2015, p. 50). One major step to ensure proper treatment is to gather informed consents. An informed consent allows all participants to understand all parts of research might influence their active decision of