The toolkit covers general principles about confidentiality, as well as specific sections about adults who lack capacity and deceased patients.
This guidance is for all doctors, NHS trusts and health boards and medical schools. Doctors can download it and adapt it to suit their own requirements.
What you'll get from this guide
- Ethical and legal principles of confidentiality.
- The circumstances when confidential information can be shared.
- Handling requests from third parties.
How to use this guide
This guidance will provide you with the key legal and ethical considerations you need to take into account when deciding to share confidential information.
It does not aim to be definitive guidance on all issues surrounding confidentiality and it points you to useful guidance from other bodies, such as the GMC, that you should use alongside the guidance.
You can use each section alone, although there are some areas of overlap. The first section is relevant to all disclosures of confidential information.