Aspects of Contractual Relations in Healthcare

Abstract

The article aims to determine the scope and limitations of ethical duties and legal responsibilities of the medical practitioner within the professional-patient relationship (PPR), identify shortcomings of the legal framework and gaps in ethical principles, and propose solutions to them. It argues that in private law the healthcare shares many similarities with conractual law; therefore, the legal basis for physician-patient relationship is the special legal capacity of the contract parties and their free will, but ethical basis ‒ their good faith. One important finding is that physician right and obligation to refuse is an aspect of patient safety and quality of healthcare and has to be acknowledged by ethics and stipulated by law. In addition, it detects that medical professionals are ethically and legally vulnerable and need special protection. All this calls to carving out the proper place of medical practitioners’ professional autonomy and freedom in current legal regulation. Used materials include literature and scientific publications on clinical and research bioethics, contractual and medical law, regulatory enactments, court judgments. Methods used in the study include descriptive, analysis, synthesis, dogmatic, induction and deduction; legal interpretation methods such as grammatical and systemic. Keywords: patient’s rights, physician’s rights, physician’s autonomy, professional-patient relationship, right to refuse, medical liability