EMERGENCY physicians are calling for tougher reporting laws for doctors who treat drug mules, claiming the lack of uniform guidelines leaves medical staff in a precarious legal position.
A report published in the Emergency Medicine Australasia journal on Thursday outlined the case of a southeast Asian man found with drugs in his small bowel by doctors treating him for nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea at The Alfred hospital in Melbourne.
The objects found were consistent with 'body packing' - drugs stored in rubber or latex packaging and swallowed, said emergency physicians Dr Biswadev Mitra and Dr de Villiers Smit.
Dr Mitra said most drug mules requiring medical attention were brought to hospitals by law enforcement officers.
However, those rarer cases discovered first by emergency departments were difficult to report to authorities because of legal obligations around patient confidentiality, Dr Mitra said.
This left many doctors exposed to the risk of legal action for breach of privacy laws.
He said doctors needed to weigh up whether considerations including danger to the public outweighed legal concerns surrounding patient confidentiality, by which time the patient would likely have been discharged.
"We get patients who are obviously users or carrying amounts of drugs and we are often very unsure about what to do in terms of the legal ramifications," Dr Mitra told AAP.
Dr Mitra said doctors wanted 'black and white' guidelines about when to notify authorities about people carrying drugs.
He said the laws could start with mandatory reporting of people found with large quantities of drugs, such as drug traffickers, but possibly extend to those found with smaller quantities.
"Rather than let doctors and their legal representatives speculate on the right course of action, clear national statutory amendments should be developed and applied in the setting of managing patients with illicit drugs," Dr Mitra said.
Dr Nicola Cunningham, an emergency physician at St Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne, said in most Australian jurisdictions mandatory reporting was only required for notifiable infectious diseases, impaired medical colleagues, and suspected child abuse.
But many other ethical and legal scenarios were raised on a daily basis with little time for consultation, which could leave patients and doctors open to legal ramifications.
Alfred Health legal counsel Bill O'Shea said there should be a statutory exemption in privacy laws allowing doctors to report cases of body packing.
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