Students’ knowledge about patient image rights

Abstract The global diffusion of technologies, used by people today, including professionals and students in health institutions, makes it easy to capture and reproduce patient images, often without the prior obtaining of an informed consent. It was intended to obtain an expanded assessment of students’ knowledge about patient image rights. This was an observational study, with a quantitative approach performed with 263 students from dentistry and medical courses. Among the interviewees, 115 (43.7%) students reported having photographed or filmed a patient examination or medical record at some point and 192 (73%) participants reported that they did not know about any legislation regarding inappropriate use of images. It could be concluded that there is a gap in the training of these students in the use of patient images since the capture of images is present during the entire graduation course and, most of the time, the consent of the patient was obtained in an unusual way.