On Exercise And Realization Of Patients Informed Consent Right By Focusing On The Conflicts Between Autonomous And Proxy Exercise

The informed consent right is a very important right for patients. Making sureit is protected and exercised will greatly smooth the doctor-patient relationship andforestall and reduce medical dissensions for a harmonious society. Patients’informed consent right as an efficient doctor-patient communication modal has beenwidely acknowledged and practiced around the world. Despite the overall satisfyingdoctor-patient relationship, local medical conflicts should not be overlooked.Compared with industrialized countries, the protection of patients’ informed consentright in China is lagging behind.This thesis has four chapters in all discussing the exercise and realization ofpatients’ informed consent right, centering on the conflicts between two ways ofexercising informed consent right, autonomous or entrusted proxy.In chapter one, some fundamental concepts and theories of informed consentright will be introduced, including its legal attributes and functions as part of personalright, its history and development as well as its legal characteristics, exercisingsubjects, contents, approaches and consent ability---the effective exercising premise.Analysis of legal regulations of exercising informed consent right will be dweltupon in Chapter Two, including the conflicts between patients’ autonomous exerciseand entrusted relative proxy exercise, legislation and its characteristics in China, thestatus quo of autonomous and proxy exercise of informed consent right as well asentrusted exercising subjects. Legislative contradictions of exercising subjects andprotection deficiency will also be revealed.Chapter Three discusses the dilemma in exercising informed consent right suchas sequential arrangements of relative proxy, applicability arguments over proxy, conflicts over patients’ informed consent right and entrusted proxy in protectivemedical treatments and abuse of proxy.In Chapter Four, there will be six legislative propositions of informed consentright. To be listed are to make laws to protect patients’ rights, to establish patients asthe benefit priority, to institute medical reservation guidance, to set up organizationsto appraise patients’ consent ability, to modify articles of compulsory emergencytreatment and set limits to apparently inappropriate decisions by either patients ortheir proxy, and lastly, to institute judicial remedy and construct procedural justice.