A sound grasp of ethical principles can help bring clarity to forensic doctors’ decision-making. In this toolkit, we outline these basic principles and give advice on how they can be interpreted in practice.

What you'll get from this guide

• How to manage conflicting obligations between patient confidentiality and sharing information for forensic purposes.
• Balancing your obligations to patients with concern for your own personal safety and wellbeing.
• Ethical considerations for working with particularly vulnerable patients.

How to use this guide

This resource is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to ethical questions arising for forensic physicians. It signposts the ethical factors you need to take into consideration when making decisions.

We hope it will also provide useful guidance to other health professionals, as well as to those in management roles in the criminal justice system who work alongside forensic physicians.