Your feedback

On this page you can read feedback to our poll in October. Your feedback will be taken into account during the review of Good Medical Practice.

Through our October poll we explored the issue of doctors treating patients where there is a risk of serious harm to themselves.

Thank you to the 68 of you that took part and responded. We had some great comments – some of which you can read below.

48 (71%) of you thought that doctors shouldn’t be required to treat patients, if doing so would place them at risk of serious harm. Some of the comments you submitted include:

• ‘A Doctor is an important member of the community, and deserves to be treated as one.  This does not mean just because of their job they should put themselves in danger.’ 
• ‘Bravery and heroism have their place, but humans should not be routinely expected to be superhuman.’
• ‘If doctors are at serious risk of harm and act and are harmed then they can't help anyone else in the future.’

9 of you thought that doctors should commit to treating patients regardless of the risk to themselves. For example, one respondent stated:

• ‘All jobs come with a certain amount risk not just doctors.  Doctors get paid more than enough so should not be able to pick and choose the easy patients to treat , if they are not capable of dealing with and treating difficult patients and situations they should quit and allow someone else have the privilege of the work.’

There were also several comments about balancing the risk to the patient and the risk to the medical professional on a case by case basis.

Finally, 11 respondents answered ‘Not sure.’ The most common reasons cited were that in some situations (for example in a war zone or during a pandemic) doctors accept a certain level of risk in taking on their role; and that it will depend on the exact circumstances of each situation.

Several of these responses also gave specific examples of situations where doctors (and other healthcare professionals) should be able to refuse to treat individual patients.

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