Thierry Vansweevelt and Nicola Glover-Thomas (eds.), <i>Privacy and Medical Confidentiality in Healthcare: A Comparative Analysis</i>

As every medical law student, scholar, and practitioner knows, a core component of the subject area is confidentiality (sometimes described more narrowly as 'medical confidentiality').By this is meant the duty-moral, professional, and legal-that a healthcare professional owes to a patient or healthcare service user to hold in confidence the personal information that the patient or service user has shared with them via oral or written communication.The professional, duty-bound (and conscience-bound), must hold that information secret.Upholding this duty, which can be traced back at least to the Hippocratic Oath of Ancient Greece, is fundamental to establishing and maintaining the bond of trust between the practitioner and patient, and between all of society and the healthcare system more widely.This much we know and consider 'sacred' in the Talmud of our subject area.But contemporary developments in medicine, including increased reliance on telemedicine (pre-and post-dating the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic) and the rise of the patient autonomy movement, as well as wider developments in the law (including data protection reform and the proposed regulation of artificial intelligence) generate new questions about the 'state of play' in this area.Alongside this, in recent years, the study and teaching of 'the protection of patient information' has expanded beyond medical confidentiality to also consider the role of privacy (as a concept and legal discipline) and data protection (as a concept and legal discipline) as the latter two also now play a fundamental role in the doctor-patient relationship-and in ways that differ from the long-standing role confidentiality has played.In this volume, part of the relatively recent Edward Elgar Global Perspectives on Medical Law series 1 edited by Thierry Vansweevelt and Nicola Glover-Thomas (the same editors as the present volume), expert contributors from around the world embark over 10 chapters (coupled with an introductory and a concluding comparative chapter) to describe international perspectives on medical confidentiality, privacy, and data protection across multiple countries or regions. 2 Before reading the book, several basic and interrelated conceptual questions piqued my interest.How might privacy and confidentiality be understood in each jurisdiction?Are they treated as synonymous concepts or distinguished, and if the latter, how so?How does data protection, which many distinguish from privacy 3 (and the former of which does not feature 1 The first volume in the series, Informed Consent and Health: A Global Analysis (Edward Elgar 2020), was also edited by Vansweevelt and Glover-Thomas.The editors are part of the World Association of Medical Law network.2 Specifically, the countries or regions that feature in the book are Belgium, Canada, Germany, Japan, Nordic countries, Qatar, Tanzania, South Africa, the USA, and the UK.3 See eg, Maria Tzanou, 'Data Protection as a Fundamental Right Next to Privacy? "Reconstructing" a not so New Right'

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