Confidentiality breaches in use of social media/new media

(Source from: http://news.bbc.co.uk)

I have encountered numerous numbers of posts in Twitter and also Facebook posted by individuals who are in my Facebook and Twitter network circle posting about their everyday task, or worst, their every minutes task! ‘I am eating...’, ‘I am in the toilet doing...’, ‘I am at... and so on which I felt is unnecessary or worst, it is ridiculous because I feel that no one is interested in knowing what you are doing every minutes.

Regarding that issue, doctors and medical students who posted that kind of information would have never realised that they are actually leaking confidential information regarding their patients, as we know, doctors are often looked up highly on protecting their patients’ rights by not disclosing their private information. AMA Council Of Doctors In Training chair Michael Bonning (ABC NEWS, 2010) said that “it's the comments you made a month ago saying which hospital you work at, two weeks ago saying which ward you work in and then the comment from today about the adverse outcome for a patient you treated where when you stack those three things up together it's suddenly very easy to identify who the patient was”.

For that reason, The Australian medical association (AMA) has launched guidelines for doctors and medical students using social media (ABC NEWS, 2010).The guidelines are designed to assists doctors and students in retaining their professionalism (ABC NEWS, 2010). One of the guidelines is ‘In maintaining confidentiality, you must ensure that any patient or situation cannot be identified by the sum of information available online’ (Mansfield et al, n.d). Mansfield et al (n.d) further note that breaching confidentiality erodes the public’s trust in the medical profession, impairing the ability to treat patients effectively.

In my opinion, the guidelines must not only applicable for doctors and medical students using the social media but also applied to all social media users. Hence, we as users of the social media should be aware that posting such information regarding ourselves would also be dangerous as we might be stalked and/or robbed, such as disclosing information on our current whereabouts. This is because as more people use social media as a primary communication tool, in this case a disclosure of unnecessary information, there is where it will lead to social missteps (ABC NEWS, 2010).

References:

ABC NEWS, 2010 ‘Guidelines for doctors’ use of social media’, viewed on 1 June 2011, <http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/11/30/3080760.htm>

Mansfield et al, n.d, ‘Social Media and the Medical Profession: A guide to online professionalism for medical practitioners and medical students’, viewed on 9 June 2011, <http://ama.com.au/socialmedia>