Blurring² the lines between social and professional relationships can impact on the level of care offered and prevent patients from being honest about important side effects.

 

Doctors should refrain from adding patients as friends on Facebook, they should not hug or allow patients to call them by their first names, regulators have warned.

 

They said those who breach³ the boundaries could face disciplinary action.

 

It comes as a survey of 338 oncologists under the age of 40, published in The Lancet Oncology, found 59 per cent said they found it difficult to tell the truth to those patients they liked.

 

Sixty per cent of respondents said if doctors felt too close to their patients, it could prevent them from making objective decisions about a person's care.

 

Lesley Fallowfield, of Brighton and Sussex Medical School, said: 'Oncology is a specialty⁴ that can be enormously rewarding but is fraught⁵ with many challenges.

 

'Young oncologists have to master dealing⁶ with anxious patients who are facing a life-threatening disease; conveying the true prognosis; discussing the complexity⁷ of modern treatments; and explaining the unavailability of some drugs, the side-effects of treatment, and likely therapeutic⁸ aims.'

 

But she said for those doctors who have entered the profession in the age of the 'cyber world', are more likely to fall victim to blurring the professional boundaries with patients.

 

She said: 'The difficulty, if you hug and kiss patients, if you allow them to call you by your first name, is that quickly the relationship can become confused as a social one rather than a professional one.

 

'Doctors become confused, "I really like this person, how can I bear to tell them that they're going to die?"

 

'They find it more difficult to be objective.'

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