- Faculty of Occupational Medicine - https://www.fom.ac.uk -

Act with honesty and integrity Part 2

Communicating information

68. You must be honest and trustworthy in all your communication with patients and colleagues. This means you must make clear the limits of your knowledge and make reasonable checks to make sure any information you give is accurate.

69. When communicating publicly, including speaking to or writing in the media, you must maintain patient confidentiality. You should remember when using social media that communications intended for friends or family may become more widely available.10., 19.

70. When advertising your services, you must make sure the information you publish is factual and can be checked, and does not exploit patients’ vulnerability or lack of medical knowledge.

In addition, you must not make unjustifiable claims about the quality of your services or convey an exaggerated impression of your effectiveness to employers; nor should you arouse ill-founded fear for the future health of their employees as a means of putting pressure on employers to use your service. 

71. You must be honest and trustworthy when writing reports, and when completing or signing forms, reports and other documents.16. You must make sure that any documents you write or sign are not false or misleading.

  1. You must take reasonable steps to check the information is correct.
  2. You must not deliberately leave out relevant information.