TY - JOUR T1 - Confidentiality: a contested value JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 718 LP - 719 DO - 10.3399/bjgp09X472566 VL - 59 IS - 567 AU - Peter Davies Y1 - 2009/10/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/59/567/718.abstract N2 - Confidentiality is apparently an absolute ethical principle in medicine.1 It is of long standing, going at least as far back as Hippocrates and stated as: ‘All that may come to my knowledge in the exercise of my profession or in daily commerce with men, which ought not to be spread abroad, I will keep secret and will never reveal.’The Oxford English Dictionary defines confidentiality as, ‘Spoken or written in confidence, characterised by the communication of secrets or private matters, betokening private intimacy, or the confiding of private secrets, enjoying the confidence of another person, entrusted with secrets, charged with a secret task’.In short, confidentiality is about keeping information secret and private. No part of it is about ‘providing information’2 to anyone else. Confidentiality is very much a deontological virtue: it places a duty on one individual to another. And by this very focus on private interaction, it is honoured between individuals, and without consideration of the wider context, and despite the utility the private knowledge might have for others.There are many good reasons to value confidentiality in medicine, in particular because it promotes trust between patient and doctor and allows fuller disclosure of the facts and context of an illness, which therefore allows fairer and more accurate assessment of symptoms and their meaning for the patient. In certain specialities, such as genitourinary medicine, this need for complete privacy is an over-riding priority to allow the … ER -