Professional secret and data confidentiality have always walked hand in hand, among other aspects, to both medicine and nursing. These issues, of an ethical and legal nature, have been changing over time, depending on the changes that have taken place in society, in the development of healthcare, and in the consolidation of intimacy and privacy principles as rights of the individual, as well as the importance of freedom and autonomy of the person against public or collective wellness.
In a clinical relationship setting, this new vision makes us look at our convictions on the information and data that are known to us in the practice of the profession and that must be restricted to others by others. It is not easy to delimit in our society where the borderline lies in the personal arena; that is, what the private or what the public information of an individual is, when it comes to reveal information regarding diseases that might endanger third parties.
The conflict arises when the wish of the affected individuals is not to inform their relatives about their diagnosis -whom they might be putting at risk- and the duty clinicians have of protecting the health of the community and more importantly to keep professional secret. A very convenient alternative to solve this dilemma would be to inform the Ethics Committees of the institutions of the actual insight of the situation. These committees would have the opportunity to evaluate each particular case enabling them to suggest the most adequate course of action based on a sound knowledge and consensus to the professionals that are faced with such moral conflict.