In summary, I have argued that the arguments offered or hinted at in favour of doctors' breaking medical confidentiality by passing on information about their patients' HIV state to others, including other doctors, when this is against the patient's considered wishes are generally unconvincing. Although in highly exceptional cases there may be justifications for overriding confidentiality, the ...

The duty of confidentiality in the normal doctor-patient relationship is well recognized. However, the duty of confidentiality between the pathologist who performs the autopsy and the requesting authorities and the next-of-kin is not as clearly spelt out. This article discusses the problems faced by the pathologist with regards to hospital and medico-legal autopsies in Malaysia. A proposed ethi...

Confidentiality stands out in psychiatry through its multiple connotations as an intrinsic necessity in the ethics of professional relationships. Thus it represents an important characteristic of this profession and at the same time a stringent request which, through its specificity, implies a direct contact with persons in need for help. Despite being inserted in professional codes and legisla...

In its original expression as a medical value confidentiality may have been absolute; this concept has become eroded by patient consent, legal actions and change in the climate of public opinion. In particular requirements arising out of legal statutes and common law judgements have greatly modified the confidentiality of the doctor-patient relationship in societies deriving their law from Engl...

This paper examines confidentiality and its nature and analyses the guidelines laid down by the Hippocratic Oath as well as the British and World Medical Associations for maintaining such confidentiality between doctor and patient. There are exceptions to practically any code of rules and this is true also for confidentiality. Some of these exceptions make it appear that very little is confiden...

We develop a condition for confidentiality-preserving refinement which is both necessary and sufficient. Using a slight extension of CSP as notation, we give a toy example to illustrate the usefulness of our condition. Systems are specified by their behavior and a window. For an abstract system, the window specifies what information is allowed to be observed by its environment. For a concrete s...

A doctor has duties towards his patients of both confidentiality and veracity and at times these may conflict, as in the following case. A mother who has the symptoms of Huntington's chorea does not wish her daughters to know. The doctor must try to make her realise how valuable the information can be to the daughters, and thus obtain her consent to inform them. If the mother's consent cannot b...

This paper presents an approach for extending the Circus formalism to accommodate information flow security concerns. Working with the semantics of Circus, we introduce a notation for specifying which aspects of Circus processes are confidential and should not be revealed to low-level users. We also describe a novel procedure for verifying that a process satisfies its confidentiality properties.