‘Changes needed for patient rights'

Press, 27 April 1989, Page 46

‘Changes needed for patient rights'

PA Wellington Legislative changes were urgently needed to guarantee patient rights and ensure the Cartwright inquiry was not in vain, said a health campaigner, Ms Phillida Bunkie. Ms.Bunkle, a lecturer in women’s studies at Victoria University, was a coauthor of the magazine article that sparked the inquiry into cervical cancer treatment at National Woman’s Hospital. Speaking at a Workers’ Educational Association forum on policing the doctors, she said the inquiry had shown a fundamental failure by the medical profession to police itself. It was important to get some kind of accountability within the health system and a method of

external monitoring and review. It was also important to set up an organisation to represent consumer interests. She had recently produced a discussion paper on the issue and would like to see a consumers’ health council set up with the same status as the Health Council. Legislation was needed on patient rights in two areas — informed consent and the right to good medical treatment. These issues needed to be enshrined in law because, though they existed in international codes in the medical profession, they were not enforceable.

People also needed to make critical evaluations

of progress and ask themselves whether just because something was new, it was progressive. In the past there had been uncritical acceptance without careful evaluation of innovation and its costs, she said. There needed to be a turn-around in priorities and a shift from the monopoly in decisionmaking. At present, health policy decision-making was undertaken only by the Health Department, medical profession and medical industry — not consumers.

Often medical victims were dismissed and there was ill-will toward actually addressing such problems and making structural changes, she said.