Compliance, Ethics and Professional Practice
This domain tests the KMPDC Code of Professional Conduct and Discipline in everyday practice. The exam presents scenarios on consent, confidentiality, records, prescribing, referrals, advertising, boundaries and the disciplinary process, and asks you to identify the correct professional response.
Core duties
- Competence and scope: practise only within your training and current competence; refer when the patient's needs exceed this.
- Informed consent: provide adequate information on diagnosis, options, risks and alternatives; consent is a process, not merely a signature.
- Confidentiality: protect identifiable patient information, including images and social-media posts; disclose only with consent or a lawful justification.
- Records: keep accurate, contemporaneous and legible records; they are evidence of care and are disclosable.
- Prescribing: follow rational prescribing standards, avoid inappropriate antibiotics or controlled drugs, and keep proper records.
- Professional boundaries and conflicts: avoid exploitation, improper relationships and financial conflicts that distort referral.
- Complaints and discipline: the Council receives complaints, investigates, and may caution, impose conditions, suspend or remove a practitioner from the register.
Worked example
A doctor posts a photograph of a patient's rare rash on a public social-media account. The face is cropped but the ward, date and rare diagnosis make the patient identifiable. Even without a name, this is a confidentiality breach. Reasoning: identifiability is contextual; consent for clinical care does not cover public posting; the doctor should have obtained specific consent or de-identified the material adequately. The Council can take disciplinary action.
Traps
Treating a signed consent form as proof of valid consent; assuming confidentiality ends at death; believing a supervisor's instruction excuses an unethical act; posting patient images without specific consent; and ignoring a complaint because no physical harm occurred.