Analysis of Breen v Williams: A Critical Examination of the Doctor-Patient Fiduciary Relationship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper critically examines Breen v Williams, where the High Court of Australia rejected the view that doctors owe fiduciary duties to grant patients access to medical records. By restricting fiduciary obligations to negative duties, the Court overlooked patient vulnerability, trust, and the therapeutic realities of healthcare. Drawing on Canadian jurisprudence, particularly McInerney v MacDonald, the paper highlights the divergence from international approaches that affirm positive disclosure duties. It argues for a reformed fiduciary framework aligned with patient autonomy, while noting that legislative reforms, such as the Health Records and Information Privacy Act 2002 (NSW), have partially addressed these gaps.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.035 | 0.060 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.018 | 0.024 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".