Doctors googling patients is a commonly broken taboo

Priya* is a foundation doctor working for a London NHS trust. Last year she worked in the emergency department and took an HIV positive patient’s history.

“The patient said she was an office administrator,” she says. “My instinct told me there was more.”

At home, Priya googled the patient’s name and found she was an adult film performer. “It raised questions: was she still working in that industry? Was the sex protected? Were they testing her regularly? I also knew she wasn’t taking her antiretroviral drugs.”

Priya wanted to discuss this with a senior colleague, in case of potential safeguarding problems. “I didn’t know how to raise it,” she says. “I was scared of getting into trouble.”

Priya isn’t alone in this quandary. A 2015 survey of Canadian emergency physicians and medical students found that, of 530 responses, 64 (13%) admitted to using Google to research a patient (10 respondents said they had searched using Facebook).1 The following year, a study of 207 German psychotherapists found that 82 (40%) had looked for patient information on the internet.2 A 2018 survey of 392 genetic counsellors and trainees in the US revealed that 130 said they had searched or considered searching a patient’s name online (110 said they had visited a patient’s social media site),3 while another 2018 survey found over half (47) of 88 psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and psychotherapists questioned in New Zealand admitted to doing so.4

It’s …