Jornal de Pesquisa Clínica e Bioética

Abstrato

The Philosophy of doing Observational Medicines Safety Research

David Rutherford, Li Wei, Isla S Mackenzie and Thomas M MacDonal

The safety of prescribed medicines is everyone’s concern and we might expect that our healthcare systems would have systems in place to link prescribing with serious adverse effects. However, in general this does not happen often because of concerns over privacy of healthcare data. This article discusses the philosophical arguments for and against the use of anonymised healthcare data for the purposes of determining the safety of medicines. We favour the utilitarian argument that the greater good is served by using these data for this purpose without the consent of individual patients.