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Medical law covers legal rights and responsibilities of patients and healthcare providers, with three main branches: confidentiality, criminal law, and negligence. Confidentiality covers patient records and consent, malpractice covers duties of doctors, and criminal law deals with actions that may be considered criminal.
Medical law is a branch of law that deals with the legal rights and responsibilities of both patients and healthcare providers. It can include a wide variety of topics, but is thought to have three main branches: confidentiality, criminal law, and negligence. The laws made for these three branches provide a basis for legal and disciplinary actions against medical professionals. They can also be used to state that a doctor has acted within the law and in the manner expected of him.
The confidentiality portion of the medical law covers patient records that contain detailed information about a patient’s health and treatment. This is who has the right to access the records, including the patient himself. This branch of the law covers the extent to which patient records are kept confidential, when and how medical professionals should share the information, and what types of situations constitute a breach of confidentiality.
The confidentiality branch of medical law also covers patient consent. Different jurisdictions have different laws regarding when and how a patient’s consent can be given and to whom a patient’s records can be released. In many places, a patient must consent to the sharing of their medical information, regardless of who requests it. Not even your lawyer, family members or your new doctor can access it without your consent.
The malpractice part of the medical law focuses on the duties of a doctor to his patients. These duties usually include providing an acceptable standard of care and exercising common sense. The medical law covers how malpractice cases can be handled. For example, if a surgeon operates on a patient and closes the patient’s incision, accidentally leaving a surgical instrument inside the patient, the surgeon may face a malpractice lawsuit. Medical malpractice laws cover the consequences for doctors and patients’ rights when a medical professional makes mistakes or fails to provide an acceptable level of care.
The criminal law portion of medical law deals with the actions of health care professionals that may be considered criminal. For example, in most places, a doctor must obtain his patient’s consent in order to treat him. Providing care against the patient’s will may be considered a crime in some places. It can be called assault and beatings, for example.
Sometimes, withholding the patient’s consent is considered criminal, and other times, a doctor does not have to obtain consent; medical law defines this distinction. For example, a case may arise where a doctor cannot obtain consent because his patient is unconscious. If the physician must provide assistance to save his or her patient’s life, the law generally permits the physician to provide the assistance that is in the patient’s best interest.
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