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The social management of medical ethics in sport: confidentiality in English professional football

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posted on 2017-10-31, 09:57 authored by Ivan Waddington, Andrea Scott, Dominic MalcolmDominic Malcolm
This paper examines one of the major ethical challenges in the practice of sports medicine, confidentiality. Drawing on interview and questionnaire data with doctors and physiotherapists working in English professional football clubs, it explores the degree to which ethical compliance has improved since the publication of, and publicity surrounding, an earlier study of medical practice in professional football conducted by Waddington and Roderick (2002). Thus, it provides an updated empirical examination of the management of medical ethics in sport. The data illustrate how the physical and social environmental constraints of sports medicine practice impinge upon the protection of athlete-patient confidentiality, how ethical codes and conflicting obligations converge to shape clinician behaviour in relation to lifestyle and injury issues and the ethically problematic contractual constraints under which clinicians and athletes operate. It demonstrates that medical ethical practice continues to be very variable and draws on Freidson’s (1970) work on medical ‘work settings’ to argue that there is a need to augment existing confidentiality policies with more structurally-oriented approaches to ensure both professional autonomy and medical ethical compliance in sport.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

International Review for the Sociology of Sport

Volume

54

Issue

6

Pages

649-665

Citation

WADDINGTON, I., SCOTT, A. and MALCOLM, D., 2017. The social management of medical ethics in sport: confidentiality in English professional football. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 54 (6), pp.649-665.

Publisher

© The authors. Published by SAGE Publications Ltd

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-09-12

Publication date

2017-10-09

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal International Review for the Sociology of Sport and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1012690217733678

ISSN

1012-6902

eISSN

1461-7218

Language

  • en

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