During a High Court proceeding in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia the presiding Judicial Commissioner proclaimed that the bedrock of society’s belief would be shattered.if the medical profession do not uphold a patient’s information safe from unauthorised disclosure. This was reported on 31 October 2013 in the local English daily newspaper, The Star.
In his judgement he called upon medical professionals and hospitals to take the duty of confidentiality very seriously since they had a duty to ensure patients’ medical information were safeguarded and not disseminated in any unauthorised manner.
In passing sentence, the court then ordered a director of the Medical Centre and two others to pay RM400,000 to a community leader for revealing his psychiatric medical records. The plaintiff claimed that the documents were circulated to the residents of his community to humiliate him and which implied he was a lunatic, of unsound mind and unfit to hold positions in the NGOs. He sued for costs and other relief deemed fit by the court for negligence and failure on the part of the Medical Centre to safeguard his personal documents, and the defendants for exemplary and punitive damages – to me it is clear that the defendants’ wilful acts were malicious and wanton.
Nevertheless, I find It is not clear from the daily’s article how the medical records landed in the hands of the two defendants who had distributed documents containing the personal particulars and medical records of the plaintiff’s treatment to other residents of the community as well as when they started to tell the residents that the documents showed that the plaintiff was a lunatic.
The moral of the story is to quote from Hillary Clinton, “In almost every profession – whether it’s law or journalism, finance or medicine or academia or running a small business – people rely on confidential communications to do their jobs. We count on the space of trust that confidentiality provides. When someone breaches that trust, we are all worse off for it.”
References:
- Nation, The Star Online, ‘Four pay price for revealing medical records’, viewed 31 October 2013 <http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2013/10/31/Four-pay-price-for-revealing-records-Community-leaders-medical-documents-were-distributed-to-residen.aspx>
