Adolescent confidentiality: Understanding and practices of health care providers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Adolescent confidentiality may present practice challenges for health care providers related to family, medical, ethical, legal, social and bureaucratic processes. It is unclear how health care providers understand and practice confidentiality with adolescents in Canada. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the knowledge and practice of health care providers at Alberta Children's Hospital (Calgary, Alberta), and to inform practice about the adolescent's right to confidentiality. METHODS: The present study was a voluntary, anonymous online survey. Invitations to participate were sent through the paediatric facility's electronic mailing list to all currently employed health care providers who potentially engaged in caregiving interactions with adolescents. The survey consisted of 15 closed items and seven open comment items. Closed items were analyzed using descriptive statistics and open comments were analyzed using manifest thematic coding. RESULTS: A total of 389 responses were received, representing health care providers in many disciplines. A variety of practices related to adolescent confidentiality and widespread misunderstanding of this issue were apparent. Respondents' comments revealed individual and team knowledge gaps regarding adolescent and parent/guardian rights, and the difference between the constructs of consent to treatment and the provision of confidential health care for adolescents. CONCLUSIONS: While health care providers regard confidentiality as paramount, the present survey revealed a wide variation in understanding and practices regarding confidential care for adolescents. This was revealed in both the qualitative and quantitative data. The authors' recommended strategies to improve the understanding and practice of adolescent confidentiality include: encouraging individuals' examination of beliefs; postsecondary instruction; knowledge-translation strategies within programs; and institution-directed guidelines and policy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".