LAW-6516 PATIENT RIGHTS AND HLTHCARE DISPARITIES
This seminar will focus on the legal and ethical sources of patients' rights and the legal duties of hospitals and other health care providers as they relate to such rights. The course will also examine issues related to patients rights such as health care access, race and health care disparities, women's health and the law, and health care reform affects patients' rights. As opposed to the Health Care Law Course, which focuses on statutory and regulatory health care law, this seminar will focus on bioethics and policy issues. Students may choose to write on any topic related to patients rights. General topics to be discussed in class include Emergency Medicine, Informed Choice, Choices about Surgery and Children's Care, Reproductive Health, Medical Research, Medical Records, Privacy and Confidentiality, Care of the Dying, Suffering, Pain, and Suicide, Death, Organ Donation, and Autopsy. Examples of specific issues that will be examined during class include, whether patients have a right to health care; whether patients have the right to refuse to be examined and treated by medical and nursing students and residents; whether patients have a right to know their prognosis; whether patients have the right to know the HIV-status of their physicians; whether hospitals can prevent patients from leaving; whether patients have the right to videotape childbirth or other activities, treatments, or procedures in which they are involved; whether health care facilities such as nursing homes can videotape their residents? activities; whether patients in all health care facilities have the right to receive visitors and to associate with other patients; whether pregnant women have the right to be informed of the option of genetic counseling and screening; whether pregnant women can refuse to be tested for illegal drugs; whether pregnant women can elect to give birth at home; and whether patients can refuse to consent to autopsy prior to death.