Forensic psychology heavily relies on collaboration. The forensic psychology is often required to work with other experts in delivering a service requested by the court or other law officers before presenting a recommendation. However, collaboration can elicit several ethical issues. Despite the presence of ethical issues, the assessment and evaluation of the psychologist or mental health professionals are fundamental in resolving court cases. For instance, medical professionals have tools such as DNA sequencing, facial reconstruction tools, presumptive drug test, and high powered microscopes that can generate test results for the case (Yadav, 2017) . The issues include avoiding harm, informed consent, delegation to others, and conflict of laboratory procedure.
Many a time, the medical forensic professional or psychologist is required to evaluate individuals whether they are sound for execution. The evaluation presents an ethical dilemma because of the medical calling of avoiding harm. However, given the legal setting, only the medical profession can perform the assessment. Secondly, tests and evaluations require the medical practitioner to obtained informed consent from the individual under the review. Nevertheless, some instances, such as the analysis of DNA to reveal the identity of a criminal has minimal to no consent presenting another ethical issue. As noted by Yadav, (2017) the medical setting involves senior staff delegating duties to junior under supervision. Thus, the delegation presents ethical issues because a person related to assessee can be included in testing and evaluation. Finally, some of the court procedures may not necessarily, agree to the standard medical test and procedures. As such, it raises ethical issues such as medical practitioners generating reports without even opening the specimens.
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Despite the many avenues that the ethical issues may arise, mental health professional adheres to the code of practice and use the evaluation tools in the development of their recommendations. For instance, they can perform a DNA analysis without consent to resolve an identity case. Therefore, they destroy all the data that they do not use to avoid confidentiality and privacy britches. It is also crucial for forensic medical professionals to follow the professional standard procedure of testing and documentation before acquiring the information required by the legal team. As such, the adherence to the prescribed process minimizes the ethical conflict during collaboration.
In conclusion, the collaboration of medical forensic professionals and legal officers present ethical issues that include avoiding harm, informed consent, delegation to others, and conflict of laboratory procedure. Despite the presented ethical challenges, the tools of medical professionals are vital for assisting the court. As such, the collaboration calls for the medical practitioners to adhere to standard tests and evaluation procedures before extracting information for the court documentation. The adherence to the standard procedure is likely to minimise the ethical issues and the likelihood of tools raising confidentiality issues
Reference
Yadav, P. (2017). Ethical issues across different fields of forensic science. Egyptian Journal Of Forensic Sciences , 7 (1). DOI: 10.1186/s41935-017-0010-1
