The main points of this policy are:

• Publication of any personal information about an identifiable living patient requires the signed consent of the patient (this is a requirement under the UK's Data Protection legislation). We expect authors to use the BMJ's consent form. In scientific pieces (eg case reports) please do not change the personal details of patients to try to disguise them: this is bad scientific practice. In addition, black bands across the eyes are wholly ineffective in disguising a patient’s identity in a photograph: we will not publish these. 
• Publication without the consent of the patient (or family) will be permitted only if all of the following conditions are met:

(a) The patient is dead and his or her family is untraceable to seek consent from

(b) The article contains a worthwhile clinical lesson or public health point which could not be as effectively made in any other way. ("Worthwhile" is intended to sit on a spectrum between "interesting" which is the publication threshold with patient consent, and "overriding public health importance", which is the publication threshold over patient refusal.)

(c) A reasonable person in the position of the patient’s relatives would not be expected to object to the publication of the case. (This requires an assessment of the intrusiveness of the disclosure and the potential that it has for causing the patient’s family, embarrassment or distress. Particular attention must be paid here to differences of cultural and social attitudes. It must not be assumed that what is a matter of indifference in one society will have the same status in another.)

(d) The risk of identification of the patient is minimised by measures designed to prevent the identity of the patient being revealed either to others or to the patient's relatives. (These measures will include anonymisation of the case and/or the author. The publication without consent of photographs will require particular scrupulous attention to anonymisation.)

*Given this policy on consent for images of patients mentioned in BMJ articles, is it inconsistent of us to publish pictures provided by agencies in news items and other articles? We believe that the BMJ would be at a disadvantage among other media if we didn't use such images, and pictures can often tell a story more powerfully than words. But we cannot take responsibility for the consent of people who are shown in pictures that we have obtained from agencies, libraries, other publications, and other commercial sources. We state clearly where pictures have come from, and we assume that they and their photographers have obtained relevant permission from models in any images showing people. Reputable picture agencies and other sources are unlikely to take the legal and financial risk of selling sensitive images without appropriate consent. If we doubt that someone photographed could have given consent—owing to severe mental illness, dementia, or learning disability, for example—we use our discretion and try to avoid images that might allow that person to be identified.