PubMed · 10251177
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K Levick. 1981. Privileged communication: does it really exist?. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10251177/
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Five years after its implementation, the Dutch Medical Treatment Act, which regulates the doctor patient contract, was evaluated in an extensive study. This act regulates (a) the right of patients to be informed and to give consent and (b) how to deal with confidential patient data. The main outcome from this study is that, in general, physicians are aware of the most important patient rights laid down in the Act and that compliance with these is mostly satisfactory. Nevertheless, the implementation can still be improved in several areas, notably the application of the more abstract provisions of the Act in everyday practice. It is recommended that measures be taken in the education and further training of health professionals and that guidelines are developed that detail how to deal with the rights of a patient in specific situations.
Five years after its implementation, the Dutch Medical Treatment Act, which regulates the doctor-patient contract, was evaluated. Two subjects were investigated: the right of the patient to be informed and to give informed consent and the way physicians deal with personal information. From a methodological point of view, this appraisal was very disappointing. At best, the evaluation report is descriptive but not evaluative: no comparative study was carried out before and after the law was implemented to ascertain effects. The Act is difficult to evaluate in practice as its goal, improving the legal position of the patient, is dogmatic. Its regulations on informed consent and agreement as well as the rules of law concerning the use of patient data for clinical research, have at times proved to be impractical even though such legal directives appear to be reasonable. The problems addressed by this law should be more widely debated and be subjected to a far more rigorous validation process.