help please!!!

If anyone out there could lend a helping hand it would be greatly appreciated. Question: Should doctors have the right to inform spouses of patients who have tested positive for AIDS and if so should they be required. (debate question need serious help)
I know that this is illegal but cant find it in the charter.

If anyone could help me it would be great appreciated.

Also i need to figure out some counter points for I am for the doctors should have the right to in the debate.

thankyou

You may be better off to search the web for length articles and points, these forum answers are usually more practical advice oriented.

When others have a right to know

Although most physicians generally agree that a patient has a right to know about his own illness, they're less certain about whether others have a right to know about it. That goes to the very heart of doctor-patient confidentiality, and has legal as well as ethical implications.

For 28 percent of our survey respondents, the answer is Yes, in certain situations, others do have the right to know about a patient's illness. Family practitioners, GPs, and internists were most likely to reply affirmatively when we asked, "Have you ever revealed confidential information about a patient if his or her condition or behavior could affect others?"

That's not surprising, says Clarence Braddock. "Primary care doctors are more accessible to family members, who might ask them to, say, contact the motor vehicles bureau about an impaired driver. Specialists, on the other hand, usually refer such requests from family to the primary care physician."

In certain instances, doctors must violate confidentiality: Laws in every state require physicians to report suspected child abuse, for instance. And infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis and many STDs, must be reported to public health authorities.

But what about notifying the sexual partners of a patient who's HIV-positive, or notifying the department of motor vehicles that a patient with an uncontrolled seizure disorder refuses to stop driving? In the case of HIV, state laws, at most, call for reporting HIV-positive test results to the local health department so officials can track the epidemic. That department may, in turn, contact patients and ask them to name sexual partners, but the patient can refuse to comply. Is it permissible, then, for you to notify the partner of a seropositive patient?

"Most of the justifiable exceptions to confidentiality involve situations where there is a real as opposed to imagined, and sizable as opposed to minute, threat to the public," says Braddock. Internist David A. Asch of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees that a doctor "has to have a very strong reason for violating patient confidentiality," such as reporting a patient who has made a specific threat toward another person.

The CEJA Code of Medical Ethics says as much: "The obligation to safeguard patient confidences is subject to certain exceptions which are ethically and legally justified because of overriding social considerations. Where a patient threatens to inflict serious bodily harm to another person . . . the physician should take reasonable precautions for the protection of the intended victim, including notification of law enforcement authorities."

An HIV-positive person who continues to have unprotected sex might not be making a specific threat, but Asch and others agree that such behavior is potentially dangerous. Nonetheless, Asch points out, "I think a lot of physicians would say that we're under a strong obligation not to report HIV-positive patients to their sexual partners, because of the discrimination that comes from being labeled HIV-positive."

Braddock explains, "You could argue that to protect the health of the public we should require the same disclosure of HIV status as we do for other communicable and infectious diseases. But when the HIV epidemic began, people identified as HIV-positive lost their jobs and were ostracized, due to misinformation about how the virus was transmitted and prejudice against homosexuals and injectable drug users. Now that treatment is available—and AIDS patients are less easily categorized—perhaps we'll have less opposition to HIV reporting."

The temptation to report an HIV-positive patient is even more compelling when the spouse is your patient, too. "The physician certainly should try to convince the patient that the spouse has a right to know," Braddock says. "You can try to change the patient's mind, but if he refuses there's no legal mechanism to force him to reveal his HIV status to his spouse or to anyone else." Still, several of our respondents say they've informed a patient's spouse—or another health professional who would be treating the patient—that the person was HIV-positive.


Click on the link below to see the whole article...

Oct 11, 2002
By:Gail Garfinkel Weiss
Medical Economics

Patients' Rights: Who should know what?
http://www.memag.com/memag/article/a....jsp?id=116463

© 2007 Advanstar Communications. All rights reserved.

[wld_team]

HIV & Confidentiality
http://www.aidslegal.com/media/pdfs/...ty_English.pdf


Ethical Dilemmas in Primary Care: Applying Objective Standards to Individual Patients
http://www.residentandstaff.com/issu...2006-10_01.asp


AIDS and Confidentiality--Contact Tracing and "Duty to inform"
http://students.washington.edu/aed/a...get/980303.htm


HIV-Infected Psychiatric Patients: Beyond Confidentiality
http://www.leaonline.com/doi/abs/10....327019eb0101_2


BODY AND MIND--'Holy Secrets'
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...gewanted=print