Confidential Healthcare for Adolescent Minors and Young Adults: A Position Paper of the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine

Healthcare professional societies have provided strong ethical guidelines and clinical best practice standards for delivery of healthcare to adolescent minors and young adults that take into account the developmental nuances inherent in adolescence and young adulthood. Healthcare professionals are extraordinarily well positioned to support age-appropriate and developmentally appropriate involvement of parents in healthcare and to encourage and facilitate communication between young people and their parents. They are also well positioned to incorporate confidentiality in adolescent and young adult healthcare in a way that promotes care-seeking, facilitates trust and open communication with healthcare professionals, minimizes risks that privacy concerns become a barrier to needed healthcare, and helps to prepare adolescents for entry into adult healthcare systems. The Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine adopts the following positions: (1) Healthcare professionals, parents, and young people need to collaborate in promoting high-quality healthcare for adolescent minors and young adults; (2) Confidentiality is an essential component of clinical practice designed to provide effective high-quality healthcare for all adolescent minors and young adults; (3) Legal protections and policy guidelines should support access to comprehensive high-quality healthcare that includes appropriate confidentiality protections for all adolescent minors and young adults; and (4) Healthcare system leaders, administrators, professionals, and all staff delivering healthcare to adolescent minors and young adults must have accurate knowledge and skills to translate the clinical, ethical, and legal basis of confidentiality protection into practice.

Published by The Journal of adolescent health : official publication of the Society for Adolescent Medicine, 2025. The guideline itself is at the source linked here.

doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2025.06.006