Study Of Doctor-patient Legal Relationship

Legal relationship between doctors and patients is the civil legal relationship which occurred in the course when medical organization offer medical services to patients .Actully,legal relationship between doctors and patients is one of civil legal relationship, because relationship between doctors and patients has three characteristics of civil legal relationsip, which are: (l)Legal relationship between the civil subjects with equal status;(2)Legal relationship that the civil subjects form with free will;(3)The rights and obligations between the subjects are usually reciprocity and mutually. In briefly, three reasons could cause by the legal relationship ,they are- (1) the medical contract made by doctors and patients;(2)the voluntary service which doctors provided to patients;(3) the medical service which offered due to forced actors. But,the legal relationsip between doctors and patients caused by voluntary service and forced actors are very scarcely.Thus,the medical contract is the main cause leading to legal relationship between doctors and patients . Whether patients are consumer or not,whether medical consumption are living consumption or not,whether Law of the People's Republic of China on the Protection of Consumer Rights an Interests should be apply to disputes between doctors and patients or not, The medical behavior have such characteristics as social welfare nature , high risks and etc., so accepting medical service can't totally equate to living consumption, the disputes caused by medical behavior is not applicable to " Law on the Protection of Consumers' Rights and Interests " But,when the medical organization offers the medicines and medical equipment service to the patients,the law is applicable, because these kinds of commodities or services does not have the characteristics of the medical behavior , the nature of this legal relationship is samilar to that of the relationship between business operator and consumer, the rights and intersts of patients who accept medicines and medical equipments from the medical organization shall be under the protection of Law on the Protection of Consumers' Rights and Interests . The object of legal relationship between doctors and patients is the medical behavior. Medical behavior refer to that medical organization and doctors use medical professional knowledge and technology to create value of health for specific person. The medical behavior , regarding people as object directly, have such characteristics as highly professional, high risk , social welfare and etc.. Just because of these characteristics , some special regulations are made on medical lawsuits, such as burden of proof and compensation for damage.The distribution of the rights and obligations between doctor and patient is the mainpurpose to study this subject, among them the patient's rights are the most important. Patients have right of health, right of equal treating, right of informed consent, right of privacy , right of declaiming compensation,etc.Among them,right of informed consent is soul and core . Right of informed consent refers to that doctors provide enough information to patients to make medical dicision ,and on the basis of these information, the patient makes their choices independently. patients act as the centre status in the medical process, so protecting the rights of patients is very important;On the other hand , the doctors should be respected too , the normal working order of medical organization should be kept, the legal rights of doctors should be protected.The current situation of the relationship between doctors and patients is not very well,there are too much suspecting between doctors and patients in recent years, and trusting in each other is broken, medical disputes occur time and time, rights of patients often be infringe;meanwhile ,news of patients or their relatives besieging hospital and hiting doctors are ofen reported in newspapers. Relationship between doctors and patients already become a factor which could lead to social instability, therefore,it's very important to solve the problem successfully.