Utilization Pattern and Privacy Issues in the use of Health Records for Research Practice by Doctors

Abstract

Research is a fundamental activity in teaching hospitals, and medical doctors use information contained in health records for research. In this process, researchers are often confronted with privacy issues. It is however not clear the extent to which doctors paid attention to this privacy issues in their research. The purpose of this study was to establish the extent to which privacy principles were followed by medical doctors in federal teaching hospitals in Nigeria when using health records for research. Survey research design was adopted for this study with two-stage random sampling technique to select 60% of the federal teaching hospitals; and 60% of the medical doctors in the selected hospitals. Attention was paid to securing patients unused data; health records was used mostly to generate data to support application for grant. There was a joint positive significant relationship between the predictor variables (privacy and health records) and the criterion variable in research practice.