Table 3 Key points and recommendations

• The Spanish Patient Privacy Protocol promotes respect for patient confidentiality among all Health Sciences students.

• Medical students were aware of the obligation of confidentiality although a high percentage possessed copies of non-anonymized patient CH reports outside the healthcare environment and were not always adequately identified.

• Despite restrictions on access to patients' CHs, more than half of the students used a health professional's password without the prior express consent of patients and mostly without the anonymization of the CHs.

• The role of university centres together with healthcare institutions is to promote theoretical training related to confidentiality and guarantee continuing medical education.

• A more feasible approach would be recommendable to ensure the educational objective of having access to CHs by establishing a direct protocolized request to ask for the patient’s consent.