Archive episode [Season 2 Episode 1]: Should information about a patient’s genetic condition be strictly confidential?

The IDEA Pod returns as Dr Natasha McKeever, programme director for the online MA Biomedical and Healthcare Ethics, interviews Amaal Maqsood-Shah, an alumnus from our campus MA programme, about her MA dissertation topic – the confidentiality of information about patients’ genetic conditions.

Despite guidance permitting clinicians the discretion to breach confidentiality, clinicians maintain confidences against a backdrop of litigation fears. As genomic medicine advances to return more information on the heritable basis of conditions, there is an increasing need for clinicians to understand when, and how, to communicate genetic information to at-risk relatives (The British Society for Genetic Medicine, 2017).

Amaal’s dissertation seeks to challenge current guidance and provide an ethical case for the non-consensual disclosure of all genetic information generated by the proband to biological relatives.

Released 19 January 2021. Presented by Natasha McKeever.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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