By the way ... Another reason not to trust your doctor

SO, DOCTORS are now meant to report their patients to the DVLA if they’re unfit to drive because of illness, such as epilepsy or dementia or visual impairment.

That’s the ‘new’ ruling from the General Medical Council, the body that regulates the medical profession.

One of the most fundamental principles of medical practice is patient confidentiality — and the moral justification for this is that it results in better medical outcomes.

This is because in all aspects of medical care it is essential for doctors to be fully aware of every fact, even if the patient might not think it relevant, and if patients are not assured of confidentiality they may withhold information that might be vital.

I recently heard about a student who’d been prescribed the Pill by her university GP. Three months on, back at home on vacation, she was stricken for the first time with severe migraine and her mother insisted on her going to the family doctor.

The student didn’t tell the GP that she’d been taking the Pill, because the doctor was her mother’s friend, but this was potentially very risky, as her first-ever migraine could have been linked to the combined oral contraceptive and she should have come off it immediately for fear of a stroke.

The General Medical Council (GMC) has always recognised the importance of confidentiality and indeed it is also recognised in law — it is actually illegal to breach patient confidentiality.

With drivers, this principle is inevitably compromised, as sometimes there is public interest in protecting society as a whole from potential harm; and so it is that doctors are reminded not to fear reprisals from the GMC if they disclose health information without the patient’s permission. In fact the GMC had already given doctors the same advice about illness and the DVLA back in 2009, but by making such a public announcement about it, this is now in the public domain, and my fear is that this will further erode the trusting relationship between doctor and patient.

This has already been undermined by the Government’s clumsy attempt to ‘bribe’ GPs not to refer their patients for particularly expensive investigations.

Patients — and doctors — want decisions to be based on genuine medical need, not according to bean-counter judgments based on money. This loss of patient trust is not the fault of doctors, and yet the task of doctors is to maintain patient trust in order to best diagnose and treat illness — far from easy against the current tides of change.