HEALTH CARE ETHICS

Health Care Ethics

Health Care Ethics

Introduction

The ethics codes of both the American Psychological Association (APA) (American Psychological Association, 2006) and the American Counseling Association (ACA) (American Counseling Association, 2005) provide a set of standards and code of conduct to guide the professional activities of their members, including the provision of counseling and psychological services. In both codes, the duty of counselors and therapists to protect and uphold their patients' right to privacy is fundamental, and both generally are interpreted as including the protection of contact confidentiality. Nevertheless, it is important that counselors and their patients understand the distinction between content and contact confidentiality, as most laws governing the confidentiality of counselor-patient communications do not protect contact confidentiality (Luepker, 2008).

Therapists' obligations to protect their patients' confidentiality derives from the patient's right to privacy, which itself derives from the more general, but central, ethical value of personal autonomy—a person's right to “self-determination.” In this case, it is the right to determine with whom personal information may be shared. Confidentiality in this sense can be understood as the counselors' duty or obligation to support patients' right to privacy by not repeating to or sharing with others information shared privately with them by their patients (Bersoff, 2007). What patients consider to be private must stay private, and it is the duty of therapists to assure that this is the case with respect to disclosures made by patients in counseling. If a patient's private information is to be shared with another, it should be shared by the patient—or at least with the consent or authorisation of the patient. In this regard, a patient's right to privacy and a patient's right to confidentiality in relation to communications shared in counseling are one and the same (Luepker, 2008).

Discussion

Because confidentiality and privacy are a patient's right, the patient ...