Yes. Young people can have confidentiality in healthcare, although there are exceptions where information may need to be shared to protect them or someone else from serious harm. The clinician should explain those limits rather than treating parental access as automatic.
Key points
- Yes.
- Privacy should be limited only for a clear reason, and any intrusion should go no further than needed.
- Dignity is preserved by explanation, consent where possible, private handling of sensitive matters and meaningful control.
The principle
Children need protection, but protection and privacy are not opposites. Good parenting and good institutions increase privacy as a child develops while keeping clear, proportionate safeguards for genuine risks.
Healthcare often requires information and physical access that would be unusually private elsewhere. That makes explanation, confidentiality and control more important, not less. Professional guidance treats dignity and confidentiality as core parts of good care.
What the evidence and standards say
Children's privacy is not merely a parenting preference. The ICO's Children's code requires high-privacy defaults for online services likely to be accessed by children and stresses transparency, data minimisation and children's best interests. NHS guidance also recognises that young people can sometimes consent to their own treatment, reflecting the wider principle that decision-making authority develops with understanding rather than appearing all at once on adulthood. General Medical Council: confidentiality – good practice in handling patient information. NHS: consent to treatment for children and young people.
Why this matters in ordinary life
Privacy is often lost through small acts rather than dramatic breaches: entering without asking, discussing something within earshot, forwarding a screenshot, leaving a camera on, reading a message because the device was available, or making a personal decision on somebody else’s behalf because it seems faster. Each act can look minor in isolation. Repeated together, they teach a person that access to them is controlled by whoever has more authority, technology or confidence.
A dignity-first approach reverses that presumption. Access needs a reason. The person should know what is happening when that is possible. Sensitive information should have the smallest necessary audience. Support should preserve the person’s own decisions instead of replacing them merely because replacement is easier.
What to ask for
You can ask for part of the appointment to take place privately. If confidentiality is important, ask the clinician to explain its limits before you disclose something sensitive. For young people, clinicians consider capacity, welfare and safeguarding rather than treating every disclosure to parents as automatic.
A proportionate way to handle it
- Tell the child what you are checking and why, unless doing so would create a genuine safeguarding risk.
- Match oversight to the specific risk rather than monitoring everything by default.
- Give private spaces, private conversations and age-appropriate control over personal information.
- Do not use humiliation, public disclosure or forced affection as behaviour-management tools.
- Review rules as the child grows instead of letting childhood surveillance become permanent.
Where the limits are real
Privacy is not a promise that adults will never intervene. A credible risk of abuse, exploitation, self-harm, serious violence or another substantial danger can justify proportionate action. The important discipline is to identify the actual risk, explain intervention when that is safe, avoid searching unrelated parts of the child's life, and reduce monitoring when the risk passes.
The useful test
Ask four questions: What is the actual purpose? What private information, space or bodily access is genuinely needed? Is there a less intrusive way to achieve the same result? When will the intrusion stop? If those questions cannot be answered clearly, the boundary has probably been set around convenience rather than necessity.
Related reading
- Should Teenagers Have Private Medical Appointments?
- How to Balance Safety and Privacy
- Should Parents Track Their Teenager's Location?
Conclusion
Privacy and dignity are practical conditions of a good life. They do not require isolation, secrecy or refusal of help. They require a presumption that a person’s body, information and private space belong to them, with interference justified by a real need rather than habit. Where safety or law requires a limit, the respectful answer is the narrowest effective limit. Everywhere else, privacy should be the default.