This analysis of the law's approach to healthcare decision-making critiques its liberal foundations in respect of three categories of people: adults with capacity, adults without capacity and adults who are subject to mental health legislation. Focussing primarily on the law in England and Wales, the analysis also draws on the law in the United States, legal positions in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and Scotland and on the human rights protections provided by the ECHR and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Having identified the limitations of a legal view of autonomy as primarily a principle of non-interference, Mary Donnelly questions the effectiveness of capacity as a gatekeeper for the right of autonomy and advocates both an increased role for human rights in developing the conceptual basis for the law and the grounding of future legal developments in a close empirical interrogation of the law in practice.

Throughout the Western world, both public and private health care systems are grappling with the problem of assuring quality while containing costs. On the one hand, governments and insurers argue that there must be some limit to the apparently endless growth of health care expenditures. On the other, patient groups and consumer advocates, already dissatisfied by the problems in holding doctors accountable for their actions, assert that such limits must not prevent patients from gaining access to essential treatments. The two movements find common cause in the development of systems of regulation intended to police the quality of care. Some of these are initiated by individuals, like the tort system of litigation over particular acts of negligence or the work of licensing boards reacting to complaints about a physician's fitness to practice. Others are corporate, as in the spread of medical audit or the introduction of schemes of management control. Such regulatory systems, it is believed, can combine the prevention of ineffective, dangerous or inefficient medical practices with the promotion of high standards of care and sensitivity to consumer demands or expectations.

Product Description: With increasing recognition of the international market in health professionals and the impact of globalism on regulation, the governance of the health workforce is moving towards greater public engagement and increased transparency...read more

Product Description: An ever increasing number of codes of conduct, disciplinary bodies, ethics committees and bureaucratic policies now prescribe how health professionals and health researchers relate to their patients. In this book, Mark Henaghan argues that the result of this trend towards heightened regulation has been to undermine the traditional dynamic of trust in health professionals and to diminish reliance upon their professional judgement, whilst simultaneously failing to trust patients to make decisions about their own care...read more

Product Description: Book by Leies, John A., McCarthy, Donald G., Bayer, Edward J.

Product Description: Current Legal Issues, like its sister volume Current Legal Problems, is based upon an annual colloquium held at University College London. Each year, leading scholars from around the world gather to discuss the relationship between law and another discipline of thought...read more

Product Description: The underlying rationale of medical law has undergone radical shifts in the brief lifespan of the discipline. Historically, the law as it related to the practice of medicine has been a muted affair. Judges, and therefore the law, have tended to defer to the medical profession and much of the substance of the law has supported medical paternalism...read more

Product Description: This new edition updates and expands the first.Readings in Comparative Health Law and Bioethics presents balanced comparative coverage of the four major areas of health law: health care organization and finance, the obligations of health care professionals and institutions to patients, bioethics, and public health law...read more

Product Description: As medical technologies and treatments develop with increasing momentum, the legal and ethical implications of medicine are being called into question as never before. This series brings together some of the most significant published essays in the field, edited by recognized experts...read more

(view table of contents)

Product Description: Throughout the Western world, both public and private health care systems are grappling with the problem of assuring quality while containing costs. On the one hand, governments and insurers argue that there must be some limit to the apparently endless growth of health care expenditures...read more

Product Description: Book by Leies, John A., McCarthy, Donald G., Bayer, Edward J.