If you are caring for someone it is important to know what treatment the person you care for is receiving so that you can provide support. Carers should be seen as equal partners in care, but this sometimes proves problematic due to the issue of confidentiality. After all, everyone has the right to a confidential service from local authority, health and voluntary services, and private information should therefore only be divulged if someone agrees to it being shared with others such as family members and Carers.
As a result, however, professionals often struggle with the duty of involving Carers whilst needing to uphold their common law duty of confidentiality to the person that the Carer is directly supporting.
Permission has to be given to disclose information, by the person being cared for, “unless disclosure can be justified in the public interest” (Mental Welfare Commission) which means that the person or public are at risk of death or serious harm. However, there may also be a difficulty of the person being able to give “informed consent”, because of their illness.
Nevertheless, if you are caring for someone it is important to know what treatment they are is receiving so that you can support them. The new Mental Health Act states “the rights and views of Carers must be taken into consideration as much as possible when any decisions about the service user's care and treatment are made. Anyone involved in the care and treatment of the service user must provide Carers with the information they need to provide effective care. However, a Carer will not receive any information that the service user does not want to have shared.”
There are different ways of dealing with the issue of confidentiality:
- The person you support can limit the amount of information they want to share. For example they can give permission to talk about the diagnosis and treatment but not about personal issues.
- If 'informed consent' is an issue, the person you care for can give consent when they are well. This can be done through an advance statement so that when informed consent can’t be given, due to an episode with their mental illness, their preferences or instructions about the treatment they would prefer to receive, or not to receive, are clearly agreed. It is helpful if a copy of this is put in their medical notes.
- The person you are caring for can nominate you as a 'named person' to share information and treatment decisions with, which may help you to understand and support them.
As a Carer, you can directly request information to aid you in your caring role, but realise that this information may be very generalised, rather than specific to your situation.
