Your right to receive confidential advice

Doctors, nurses and other health workers are not allowed to give out information about you without your consent, unless they think you are in danger. If you are under 16, doctors and other workers still have to keep what is said private. Sometimes, a health worker may decide that a patient is not mature enough to make decisions about their treatment, but the consultation can still be confidential.

In exceptional circumstances a health worker might decide they needed to pass on information about a patient to someone else. For example, a doctor might suspect their patient was being seriously hurt in some way. Even so, they would not normally pass on any information without first discussing it with their patient. Government guidance for workers in England means that they are likely to be more worried about young people under 13 who are having sex and might think it would be in the young person's best interest to get some extra help from a social worker. In Northern Ireland this applies to young people under 14.

If you are worried about this you can always ring the doctor's surgery or the clinic and ask questions about their policy on working with young people, before you go. For example, you could ask:

• Is the information young people give you kept confidential, even if they are under 13/14?
• Do you ever have to tell anyone else about young people who ask for advice about things like contraception?
• Would you ever give out information about a young person to anyone else, without telling the young person?
  

If your confidentiality is breached (which means the doctor or other health worker tells someone else without your permission and they don't have a good reason), the worker may have to justify their decision to their professional body.