BMJ 2002;324:1210-1213 ( 18 May )

Education and debate

Education and debate
    Consent, confidentiality, and the threat to public health surveillance
    Commentary: Don't waive consent lightlyinvolve the public

Consent, confidentiality, and the threat to public health surveillance

Chris Verity, past chairman, British Paediatric Surveillance Unit Executive Committee ^a, Angus Nicoll, director ^b. 

^a Child Development Centre, Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge CB2 2QQ, ^b PHLS Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre, 61 Colindale Avenue, London NW9 5EQ

Correspondence to: C Verity christopher.verity@addenbrookes.nhs.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Effective protection of public health requires direction from the information provided by disease surveillance¹for example, in the cases of AIDS and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease surveillance data led to action that protected health. ^{2 3} Health surveillance relies entirely on prompt and accurate reporting of the occurrence of disease by doctors and other health professionals.¹ Recently there has been increased concern in the United Kingdom about the need to maintain the confidentiality of information arising from consultations between doctor and patient. Documents have been issued regulating or advising on transfer of patient data. Some have argued that, unless needed for direct patient care, data should not be transferred to third parties without patients' explicit consent, or, alternatively, that all identifying information must first be removed.⁴ The difficulty in countering these arguments arises partly from the fact that health surveillance, including that for communicable diseases, has been neglected in official guidance on confidentiality.⁵ . . . [Full text of this article]

CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    StumbleUpon    Technorati    What's this?

Relevant Articles

Using personal health information in medical research

Tom Walley
BMJ 2006 332: 130-131. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Survey of informed consent for registration of congenital anomalies in Europe

Araceli Busby, Annukka Ritvanen, Helen Dolk, Nicola Armstrong, Hermien De Walle, Isolina Riaño-Galán, Miriam Gatt, Robert McDonnell, Vera Nelen, and David Stone
BMJ 2005 331: 140-141. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

A feasibility study of signed consent for the collection of patient identifiable information for a national paediatric clinical audit database

Patricia A McKinney, Samantha Jones, Roger Parslow, Nicola Davey, Mark Darowski, Bill Chaudhry, Charles Stack, Gareth Parry, Elizabeth S Draper for the PICANet Consent Study Group
BMJ 2005 330: 877-879. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

New consent rules threaten public health
BMJ 2002 324: 0. [Full Text]

This article has been cited by other articles:

• Gershon, A. S. MD MSc, Tu, J. V. MD PhD (2008). The effect of privacy legislation on observational research. CMAJ 178: 871-873 [Full text]  
• Campbell, B., Thomson, H., Slater, J., Coward, C., Wyatt, K., Sweeney, K. (2007). Extracting information from hospital records: what patients think about consent. Qual Saf Health Care 16: 404-408 [Abstract] [Full text]  
• Haynes, C. L, Cook, G. A, Jones, M. A (2007). Legal and ethical considerations in processing patient-identifiable data without patient consent: lessons learnt from developing a disease register. J. Med. Ethics 33: 302-307 [Abstract] [Full text]  
• Ford, H. L (2006). The effect of consent guidelines on a multiple sclerosis register. Mult Scler 12: 104-107 [Abstract]  
• Tu, J. V., Willison, D. J., Silver, F. L., Fang, J., Richards, J. A., Laupacis, A., Kapral, M. K., the Investigators in the Registry of the Canadian, (2004). Impracticability of Informed Consent in the Registry of the Canadian Stroke Network. NEJM 350: 1414-1421 [Abstract] [Full text]  
• Cassell, J, Young, A (2002). Why we should not seek individual informed consent for participation in health services research. J. Med. Ethics 28: 313-317 [Abstract] [Full text]  

Rapid Responses:

Read all Rapid Responses

Bias in data introduced by requiring consent

Steven H Woolf, et al.
bmj.com, 26 May 2002 [Full text]

Response to commentary on our article about patient consent for health surveillance.

christopher m verity, et al.
bmj.com, 27 May 2002 [Full text]

Is medical surveillance an unmitigated blessing?

Roger M. Goss
bmj.com, 8 Jun 2002 [Full text]

Online poll

Find out more on doc2doc >>