RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Medicine and the media: the ethics of virtual medical encounters
JF Clinical Medicine
JO Clin Med
FD Royal College of Physicians
SP 11
OP 15
DO 10.7861/clinmedicine.19-1-11
VO 19
IS 1
A1 Alistair Wardrope
A1 Markus Reuber
YR 2019
UL http://www.rcpjournals.org/content/19/1/11.abstract
AB The expansion of new forms of public media, including social media, exposes clinicians to more illness experiences/narratives than ever before and increases the range of ways to interact with the people depicted. Existing professional regulations and ethics codes offer very limited guidance for such situations. We discuss the ethics of responding to such scenarios through presenting three cases of clinicians encountering television or social media stories involving potential unmet healthcare needs. We offer a structured framework for health workers to think through their responses to such situations, based around four key questions for the clinician to deliberate upon: who is vulnerable to harm; what can be done; who is best placed to do it; and what could go wrong? We illustrate the application of this framework to our three cases.