Ethics of Clinical Pathologist
Viroj Wiwanitkit MD*
Affiliation : * Department of Laboratory Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University
Laboratory investigation is a general process in every hospital. Due to the increasing number of
laboratory tests, physicians need to have a full awareness to prevent non ethical practice in laboratory
process.Every physician should be aware of the medical ethics for clinical pathology. The cores medical ethics
for clinical pathology include:
1. Proper laboratory request(1): Request only necessary tests with indication, not request aimed at
service change from the patient and request all required tests without bias on the patients socioeconomic
status
2. Proper specimen collection procedure(2): “first, do no harm” to the patient, practice gently and
bring the least suffering to the patient.
3. Proper keeping of laboratory result(3): Keep patients’ information confidential, and do not change
the laboratory results to increase the returns.
Explanations and examples on some problems relating to the three topics are presented in Table 1 to
help the reader realize the importance of these cores values.
Keywords : Ethics of Clinical Pathologist
