What ethical concerns do you face doing this for someone who has not consented?

What if the patient didn't want their family to be reached?

What if the patient has been trying to escape an abusive family and you're leading them straight back to the patient!

I always wonder when my local police force Tweets 'missing person' and I think 'what the fuck if they were trying to escape an abusive partner!!'. Or what if they just don't want to be found by anyone for some reason that's none of your business.

I'm not sure police or hospitals should be going around asking after anyone who's an adult who hasn't consented.

Those are edge cases. Disappearing and living off the grid is not a sustainable or sane way to escape an abusive relationship, and (if you're an attractive white woman) can escalate to national manhunts which just piss everybody off in the end, least of all your abusive partner.

Abruptly disappearing is a behavioral pattern more common among the mentally ill than abuse victims, in which case alerting family is probably the most ethical thing one could possibly do. (If anything, the family themselves might not want to be contacted-- "oh, god, him again?")

> I'm not sure police or hospitals should be going around asking after anyone who's an adult who hasn't consented.

Everyone is someone's child, or parent. For the sake of a minority of lone wolves who just want to be left alone, why expect the rest of society to die alone in their hospital beds? Not everybody can even give consent, or are mentally sound enough to to do.

The most human thing we can do is to try to connect patients with their families, even if it goes wrong a small fraction of the time.

There's no correct answer, so I think you do the best you can with the information you have. Most of the time, people want their family to be notified in case of emergency so I would think that would be the default course of action. I'd be more troubled by a hospital or doctor making medical decisions for me without trying to contact family.

How would you handle it? Say you are in a park and you see somebody drop from an apparent heart attack. Do you start CPR or do you stand there wondering if maybe they have a do-not-resuscitate order on file somewhere?