How the Practicing Physician Encounters Human Rights in Daily Clinical Situations

Abstract

Our study shows the awareness and application of the concept of  human rights (understood as patient rights) in a hospital environment. We sought to determine whether such rights are respected, soliciting the opinion of patients and as to how it acts as a measure for whether service delivery is wholly effective in the conext of the clinician-patient relation. Our research was undertaken to signal a contemporary need in service delivery: health personnel involved in the delivery of surgical services have much to learn from the practical applications of human rights principles and the essential role they must fulfill in research and advocacy in order to improve the availability of surgical care globally. Human rights, medical ethics and empathy are parallel mechanisms working at the level of the patient-clinician relationship. This, in general, can influence the quality of care and communication for the better. Our study was conducted in 2011 and lasted 6 months. The research sites were the public hospitals located in the Kujavian-Pomeranian region of Poland. There were  two classes of hospitals: the first, had more than 400 beds (Group I) and the second one: above 400 beds (Group II). We solicted the opinion of 180 patients who had undergone laparoscopic cholecystectomy. The main planned outcome (hypothesis zero) of the study was that there were no differences between the two Groups of hospitals, and therefore no substantial variance in service delivery. The Mann-Whitney U test evidenced that judging by the significance level (p > 0.05), there is no basis for rejecting hypothesis zero.