Patient Bill of Rights Vs Patient Care Partnership

A) Patient’s Bill of Rights 1. The bill was introduced because many people at that time, including the AHA, believed that physicians had attained too much power. Originally based on 12 core principles (which included the right to refuse treatment and the right to confidentiality, among others), this Bill of Rights has since been modified to make patients more aware of their rights and to increase the accountability of healthcare providers and systems. By the 1990s, the Joint Commission required every patient to be aware of their Bill of Rights. 2. The Patient’s Bill of Rights was introduced in 1973 by the American Hospital Association.

B) Patient Care Partnership 1. In 2001 efforts were made to transform the Patient’s Bill of Rights from a non-binding declaration into a law. It eventually failed after the law was sent back to the Senate from the House of Representatives, but in 2006 the AHA succeeded in changing the format of the Bill of Rights into a more assessable and readable brochure format. This became the Patient Care Partnership. 2. The PCP was also created by the AHA and was distributed in 2002.

C) Comparisons and Contrasts 1. Comparisons- The PCP maintains the same themes as the previous Patient’s Bill of Rights but by making it more legible and assessable to all patients, they believed that they could help better protect the rights of patients. Yet both versions of the bill contained similar issues, which include problems of readability and lack of distribution or patient’s knowledge of the bill. mainly due to the lack of brochure distribution, a lack of legislation in some states, as well as the continuation of a higher than average reading level required to understand the PCP. 2. Contrasts- The Patient’s Bill of Rights eventually went through some minor alterations before it eventually transformed into the Patient Care Partnership during the 21st century. Comparatively, the Patient Care Partnership was made to be more readable for the mass public and it was distributed in a fashion that made it more available for patients in hospitals (hospitals were also required to provide patients more readily with their rights according to the PCP brochure). There were still several issues that arose concerning the complexity of the Patient’s Bill of Rights though, mainly because a lot of the texts available at that time were still written in a competency level that exceeded patients’ average capacity and there were also issues concerning the lack of available texts in different languages. But generally, the PCP was a step up from the highly unreadable legal jargon of the original Patient’s Bill of Rights.

D) Legal/Ethics Issue- 1. One specific issue that would help analyze the transformation between the Patient’s Bill of Rights and the Patient Care Partnership would be to explore physicians' ethics and analyze the complications of a man refusing to continue his cancer treatment. In a hypothetical situation, suppose that a man wishes to eliminate the continuation of his cancer treatment after many years of unfruitful chemotherapy. His physician strongly insists that canceling his treatment would put him at risk, but the patient is not certain that he wishes to live through treatment and would rather take a chance living without chemotherapy. After much insistence, the patient finally asks to see some sort of patient’s rights. He eventually receives a brochure, but the patient is not a high school graduate and his literacy is lower than an 8th-grade reading level. He is eventually convinced to continue treatment and dies as a result.

Annotated Bibliography

Konigsberg, R. D. (2011, June 2). The Refuseniks. time, 177, 72-77.

In this article for Time Magazine, Ruth Davis Konisberg details the experiences of cancer patients who have been directly affected by the ramifications of the Patients’ Bill of Rights. She begins by detailing first-hand accounts of the consequences patients have faced after succumbing to the insistence of their physicians without the proper knowledge of their rights.

She then brings these experiences into focus by exploring the progress of America’s Patient’s Bill of Rights and the way that it influences the decisions of unknowing hospital patients. This article would serve as a great asset in which to explore my research question as well as to provide some background on the nature of the Patient’s Bill of Rights in the U.S. today.

Paasche-Orlow, M. K., Jacob, D. M., Hochhauser, M., & Parker, R. M. (2009). National Survey of Patients' Bill of Rights. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 24(4), 489-494.

In this article, a study was conducted in order to confirm how the current version of the Patient's Bill of Rights, or Patient Care Partnership, truly functions in the United States. By conducting in-depth surveys and research, this article outlines how the results of this study reveal the way in which the Patient's Bill of Rights truly functions.

Among many other things, the researchers conclude that the revised Patient's Bill of Rights still exceeds the competency level of most American patients and that many hospitals across the country fail to properly implement these rights to their patients. This article will be very valuable to this project because it provides hard evidence supporting both sides of the Patient's Bill of Rights debate as well as by providing an in-depth history of the bill.

Reece, S. (2001). The Circuitous Journey to the Patient's Bill of Rights: Winners and Losers. Albany Law Review, 65(1), 17-79.

This article was originally published in the Albany Law Review and outlines the positive and negative effects of the Patient's Bill of Rights throughout its history. The focus of this article is on the financial ramifications surrounding the bill and the effect that the American health care system has had on its status.

This article would provide a great counterpoint to my other sources because it probes the monetary aspects of the Patient's Bill of Rights debate. Besides giving more insight into the history of the bill, it would provide another perspective on the battle to get the bill passed that involves the financial stakes of different parties involved (ie: politicians, medical care companies, etc.).