Doctor censured for revealing records

Press, 9 August 1988, Page 6

Doctor censured for revealing records

PA Dunedin A Wairoa doctor has been censured by the Medical Practitioners’ Disciplinary Committee for giving information on a patient to a solicitor, which was later used in matrimonial property proceedings in the High Court. According to a report in the latest “Medical Journal,” the committee said it found that Dr J. C. U. Tait breached ethical standards when he gave information at the request of a solicitor representing a woman’s former husband, which was used in the proceedings. It ordered Dr Tait also to pay one-third of the costs of the inquiry. The committee’s report said Dr Tait was asked to provide the material in August last year. The information, the article says, related to events of 13 years earlier, and was incorporated in an affidavit .which was sworn by Dr Tait on August 14 last year. The report said the complaint related to al-

leged breach of confidentiality by the disclosure of facts contained within the affidavit. Second, a breach is alleged of section 32 of the Evidence Amendment Act, 1980, which, prohibits disclosure by doctors of communications between a doctor and patient without the patient’s consent. “Dr Tait believed that he had in no way breached patient confidentiality,” the report says, “because some of the information used was common knowledge in the small community and (that) it had not been obtained within the doc-tor-patient relationship.. “He said that the remainder of the matters contained in the affidavit was obtained from other concerned members of the patient’s family, and was not derived direct from the complainant.” The committee’s finding said the preparation of an affidavit of this degree of importance required by a High Court hearing needed the utmost care and attention to ensure

patient confidentiality was preserved at all times. “We find,” it says, “that Dr Tait fell below the standard required of a general practitioner, particularly in view of the more than 30 years experience. The affidavit contained at least two examples of inaccuracy in its first three paragraphs, one concerning a consultation date and the other relating to the alleged discontinuation of the complainant’s therapy.” The report said the latter inaccuracy was potentially misleading to the High Court, and Could have been unfairly damaging to the complainant. “In our view,” the report says, “there was a breach of ethical standards by Dr Tait in that he disclosed medical information concerning his former patient, the complainant. “It is irrelevant as to how this information was obtained by him, if it was derived, as we find it was, in the course of a doctorpatient relationship.”