Contact details:
Association for Medical Law and Bioethics
Charles University, Faculty of Law
nam.Curieovych 7
11000 Praha 1
Czech Republic
E-mail: AMPB@centrum.cz or dostal@juristic.cz
Telephone: (+420)777012579

About the project:

The project started in connection with the expected medical law reform and planned EU accession. Its purpose is to bring new ideas, to compare Czech and foreign legal solutions, to provide informations for the public and to publish results of the grant project Law and Medicine, sponsored by the Law Faculty Foundation, the Sasakawa Foundation and the Open Society Fund.

The project covers mainly the following issues:

Patient Rights
Czech Republic undergoes a transition from old-fashioned paternalistic relations between physician and patient to a modern attitude based on patient autonomy. The laws governing this issue are very old, some of them date back as far as to 1960s, therefore they do not reflect the changes. In 2001, however, came into force the Council of Europe Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine. According to our Constitution, international human rights conventions are directly applicable and have higher legal force than national laws. Therefore, the modern medical law rules from the Biomedicine Convention should apply. The problem is that very few people are aware of this new legal document and physicians are used to work according to the outdated national legislation. The courts also did not react so far. Due to this, there is a great deal of uncertainty in this area.

Health Care Funding and Resource Allocation in Czech Republic
The health care is, according to the Constitution, free of charge. The provision is financed by the means of social insurance. However, the systems starts to suffer from lack of money, due to factors such as ageing population, civilisation diseases and application of overly expensive medical techniques. There are some geographic inequities. Some critics say that the system is inefficient, pointing at the bad management of hospitals and funding institutions, lack of patient responsibility for own health, insufficient cooperation between health and social care etc. The reforms, mainly in financing, are expected.

The Problems of Medical Malpractice Law
There is very little proportion of complaints going through the civil litigation, patients tend to use (and sometimes misuse) the penal and disciplinary proceedings. The main reason is that the civil litigation is quite expensive, lenghty and unreliable: there are long delays, very strict burden of proof standards, patient has bad access to the evidence and there are limits on claimable damages for pain and suffering (less than tenth of the amounts typical in average to Western countries). On the other hand, the penal proceedings are run by state for free. The physicians are not used to sue patients back for loss of profit due to false accusation. Dissatisfied patients tend to attack physicians in media rather than use the law, and that often brings undue hostility to the physician-patient relations.

Specific Issues
The project also deals with issues of alternative medicine, euthanasia, organ donation, assisted reproduction etc.

Ondrej Dostal, President of the Association for Medical Law and Bioethics
4.4.2003