Iranian Journal of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine

Confidentiality is considered as a principle commitment of all health care professionals. Respecting confidentiality creates and maintains the trust between patients and health professionals.

Patients should be assured that their information will be kept confidential unless there is a persuasive reason. Confidentiality originates from principle of patient’s autonomy, and there is no need to be requested frankly by patient.

All of the patient’s information is naturally secret unless the patient gives consent to disclosure. In this article we aimed at reviewing challenges of confidentiality in pharmacy practice in addition to presenting the national and international guidelines in this regard. The pharmacists as the last link of the treatment team are receiving a wide range of information about their patients. Therefore respecting confidentiality in pharmacy practice should be considered as a very important requirement and it seems that privacy and confidentiality is at the primary rack of ethical and legal issues in pharmacy. Obviously fundamental challenges are existent in the pharmacy which remained unsolved. In this regards all those challenges should be determined, analyzed and practiced. In the paper we introduced some challenges including challenges related to the physical environment, pharmaceutical consultation, patients confidentiality in presence of patients family, etc and presented national and international guidelines which assists in dealing with the challenges.