Health Systems in Transition - Hungary - World Health Organization ...

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Health systems in transition Hungary
established by this law: the right to provision of care; the right to human dignity;
the right to maintain personal contacts while under treatment in hospital; the
right to stop or refuse treatment and leave the medical institution providing the
care; the right to autonomy and to give informed consent; the right to get to
know the patient file; the right to privacy and the right to submit a complaint
to the providers or to the owner of the providers (1997/20).
To enforce these rights, the institution of patient representatives was
created by Act CLIV of 1997 on Health, with the aim of supporting patients
in accessing their medical files and formulating their complaints, to represent
the patient for the providers and to inform medical professionals of the change
of the regulation regarding patient rights (1997/20), but the new institutional
framework started in the organization framework of the NPHMOS as of July
2000 with the implementation of the regulation of the then Minister of Health
(1999/14). After the resolution of the National Assembly in 2002 (2002/2),
representation of the rights of the patients and citizens participating in social
welfare programmes were integrated in one public foundation, while the
representatives were employed and supervised by the Foundation for the Rights
of Patients, Social Service Beneficiaries and Children (2004/1). With respect
to hospitals, the representative has the obligation to work one full day in the
hospital per week and also to be available for consulting hours once a week
in the regional office of the Foundation (2004/1). According to the report of
the Foundation, there were 52 patients’ right representatives of the Foundation
covering 144 hospitals and 29 outpatient providers. The report evaluated the
cooperation with the management of the providers as effective, and the visibility
of the contact information of the representative is 98% (Foundation for the
Rights of Patients, Social Service Beneficiaries and Children, 2009). The
representatives work mostly with case management in 45% of their working
hours and with patient information in 20%. The Foundation handled 11 297
complaints in 2009, most of which addressed breaches of the right to health
care provision but there is an increasing trend of breaches of the right to human
dignity (Foundation for the Rights of Patients, Social Service Beneficiaries and
Children, 2009).
These findings were confirmed by the observation of the members of the
National Health Council, who concluded that the current implementation of
the regulation should be improved and that the most critical areas are the
right to human dignity, the right to information and the right to proper care
(National Health Council, 2010). They called for the evaluation, development
and restructuring of the institutional mechanism of patient rights.