|
|
Patients' Rights, The Right To Health, And Medical Ethics Within The Context Of An Intern Survey
Emel ÖNAL*, Yıldız TÜMERDEM**
* Uzm.Dr., İstanbul Üniversitesi İstanbul Tıp Fakültesi Halk Sağlığı AD,** Prof.Dr., İstanbul Üniversitesi İstanbul Tıp Fakültesi Halk Sağlığı AD, İSTANBUL
Countries take the necessary precautions by means of laws to provide their citizens with bodily and mental health. For this reason, they plan their health care services, build up health units and control them. The related services are produced and managed in these units. Physicians perform their professions according to laws and ethical principles, as well as in accordance with scientific knowledge and technical skill, in different degrees of necessity and obligation within the health system. During their performance, the rights of both patients and healthy individuals are involved. Because of the importance of the subject, more importance should be given to the subject of Medical Ethics in the curricula of medical schools, including the internship, with a view to decrease the indeterminancy so far neglected in the professional practices. With this in mind, we applied questionnaires which comprise the basic limits of patient and health rights to 147 intern doctors, between 1 August - 31 December, 1998. According to all of them, everyone has the right to a healthy life. 84.4% of the intern doctors expect this right from the " determiners of the health care system ", 58.5% from the "developers of health care", 39.5% from the "health care managers", 29.9% from the " builders of health care unit", 29.3% from the " determiners of the economic conditions ", and 22.4 % from the " determiners of our culture and the level of education". The most known of the patient rights was " patients right to have information about his illness", with a percentage of 68.7. The results in our study support our view that a contiuing education on Medical Ethics, of which we can only touch on the essential principles because of the lack of time, would be useful.Keywords: Patients' rights, Right to health,
Right to life, Medical ethicsTurkiye Klinikleri J Med Ethics 1999, 7:72-77
|
|
|
|
|
