Human Rights in Patient Care: A Theorethical and Practical Framework

Patient care is a discrete and important aspect of the right to health that merits attention and scrutiny as a human rights issue. A vast and severe range of human rights violations occur in the patient care context that violate rights in addition to the right to health, including many civil and political rights. In response to growing concern about this abuse in many parts of the world, the phrase and concept “human rights in patient care” has recently grown in usage as a framework for monitoring, documenting, and analyzing abuses in patient care settings, and in some cases, holding governments and other parties accountable. This article outlines a framework for human rights in patient care that is closely related both to the right to health and to the more colloquial notion of “patients’ rights” but is distinct from them—as well as from complementary frameworks such as patient safety and bioethics—in important ways