There is a duty of confidentiality on the part of mental health nurses when they handle confidential patient information. Nonetheless, it may be necessary to disclose confidential information of a patient if the patient is assessed as being a risk to self or others, to protect the patient or others from harm. However, disclosing information inappropriately may constitute a breach of confidentiality. There is a paucity of information on how mental health nurses understand the rules of confidentiality when deciding to withhold or disclose confidential information in these circumstances. An integrative review of the literature was undertaken to explore the disclosure of confidential information by mental health nurses when they assess a patient as being a risk of harm. The findings indicate the rules of confidentiality are not well understood, or are not adhered to by mental health nurses. Risk assessments were found to underpin deliberations to withhold or disclose confidential information of a patient, despite risk being difficult to predict with any certainty. For risk assessment, mental health nurses were noted to prefer their unstructured clinical judgement over actuarial methods; and defer to their clinical intuition over scores of a structured risk assessment instrument, when making structured clinical judgement‐backed decisions in this area of their practice. Gaps in the literature that may be addressed by future empirical research were revealed during this integrative review.

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Nurses practising in mental health are faced with challenging decisions concerning confidentiality if a patient is deemed a potential risk to self or others, because releasing pertinent information pertaining to the patient may be necessary to circumvent harm. However, decisions to withhold or disclose confidential information that are inappropriately made may lead to adverse outcomes for stakeholders, including nurses and their patients. Nonetheless, there is a dearth of contemporary research literature to advise nurses in these circumstances. Cognitive Continuum Theory presents a single-system intuitive-analytical approach to examining and understanding nurse cognition, analogous to the recommended single-system approach to decision-making in mental health known as structured clinical judgement. Both approaches incorporate cognitive poles of wholly intuition and analysis and a dynamic continuum characterised by a 'common sense' blending of intuitive and analytical cognition, whereby cues presented to a decision-maker for judgement tasks are weighed and assessed for relevance. Furthermore, Cognitive Continuum Theory promotes the importance of determining pattern recognition and functional relations strategies, which can be used to understand the operationalisation of nurse cognition.