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    Thursday, April 12, 2007

    Life Without HIPAA: Britain's health secretary says British Muslim women don't trust their doctors:

    Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt is embroiled in a row over whether some Muslim GPs are guilty of breaking the confidentiality of their patients.

    Two medical magazines reported that Ms Hewitt said some Muslim women feared raising sensitive issues with their GP in case it got back to their families.

    ....Some women patients feel they cannot trust their own GP, who knows the patient's extended families

    Ms Hewitt was asked about the issue by reporters after addressing a meeting of the Fabian society.

    She told Pulse magazine: "I have had Muslim women give me chapter and verse on very distressing breaches of confidentiality by Muslim GPs.

    "Some women patients feel they cannot trust their own GP, who knows the patient's extended families."

    "If they go and talk to him about a very difficult situation concerning domestic violence or sexual health problems they fear that he will share that with other members of the community. They are very close-knit communities."
    .
    ..."The Secretary of State has simply recounted evidence from the Muslim Women's Network on Health that some Muslim women in some parts of the country are not going to see their GP because they are nervous about reporting certain problems."

    One woman who took part in the survey of more than 200 Muslim women said: "When I was younger - I grew up in Essex, a mixed community - there were only a few GPs the young women would go to - because GPs in the community felt able to pass information about your sexuality to your parents."


    Muslim doctors take offense at such a suggestion, but it's a common fear. I sometimes see a patient who comes to me for a sensitive problem they don't trust to their regular doctor because he sees their parents, or spouse or because they belong to the same church or live in the same neighborhood. I'm sure some of my patients do the same. Their fears are unfounded, but real nonetheless. (This being the country that it is, we have laws, not just ethical conventions and professional standards.)

    Women living in a community that views them as property rather than individuals with rights are even more prone to these fears, and perhaps rightly so. Every once in a while an older patient will tell me a tale of physician betrayal from the 1940's or 1930's when things were more patriarchal. It invariably involves a sexually transmitted disease for which they were surreptitiously treated. In those cases the husband's confidentiality was over-respected at the expense of the wife's right to informed consent. In every case it undermined their confidence in physicians - especially male physicians. The doctors may have meant well, but they did a disservice both to themselves and to their patients.

    This particular community of British women is sending a signal to their doctors that there's a problem in their relationship. There's no trust. The doctors doctors need to listen.

    UPDATE: Good point in the comments:

    Do our confidentiality laws apply to children? Probably not up to a certain point, or for certain circumstances. We all know about notification laws on abortion.

    Anyway, why on earth would a doctor respect the privacy of someone he doesn't even regard as a responsible adult. After all, Allah made the man to excel the woman and he pays the bills.
     

    posted by Sydney on 4/12/2007 10:27:00 PM 2 comments

    2 Comments:

    Do our confidentiality laws apply to children? Probably not up to a certain point, or for certain circumstances. We all know about notification laws on abortion.

    Anyway, why on earth would a doctor respect the privacy of someone he doesn't even regard as a responsible adult. After all, Allah made the man to excel the woman and he pays the bills.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 3:00 PM  

    There is also a news item on bbc.com that reports that most younger doctors believe that the NHS will begin charging for some procedure in the next few years.

    Also, 1/2 of them believe they will no longer work for the NHS in 10 year's time. Presumably, they will go into private practice or elsewhere.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 8:01 PM  

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