Alan Travis reports:
Doctors and other health professionals will be asked to identify people who are “vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism” as part of the government’s redrawn counter-terrorism programme to be detailed on Tuesday.
[…]
One “key message” of the document is that it is not a programme to spy on Muslim communities, but doctors will be asked to identify people who may be “vulnerable” to recruitment by terrorist groups.
The British Medical Association said doctors were allowed to breach patient confidentiality in the public interest – for example, if they thought someone was going to blow up a bus.
But a spokeswoman said the plan “goes a lot further and we would have an issue with that”.
She said: “Doctors cannot look into the future and say how someone might behave. This would threaten the trust of the doctor and patient relationship. A doctor’s role is to treat the patient in front of them, not predict how the patient will behave in future.”
Read more in The Guardian.
I’ve blogged in the past on Chronicles of Dissent about not putting tin stars on doctors. Not only does the plan put doctors in the position of breaching confidentiality, but it asks them to make forensic predictions when there is no clear empirical basis to think that general practitioners or others who are not specially trained in this specialized area can make accurate predictions like this.