Patients campaigning for better standards of care can draw solace from the fact that healthcare professionals are right behind them. In the Economist Intelligence Unit survey, most respondents—whether healthcare professionals or life science executives—in all the surveyed countries say that patients should have guaranteed rights: to information about their condition and treatment, to not have to wait so long for treatment that their condition becomes clinically compromised, to a second opinion, to observance of quality standards, to their choice of doctor and specialist, to a choice of treatments, to personalised treatment, and to complain. However, only one-third of respondents agree that patients should have a right to compensation.
Several European countries—Belgium, Cyprus, Finland, France, the Netherlands and Spain—have already passed laws upholding patients' rights. In Denmark and Sweden, patients' rights are incorporated into more general laws regulating healthcare. Germany does not possess a patients' rights legislation, but it does have a binding Patient Charter. In January 2009, the UK prime minister, Gordon Brown, launched what he termed an "historic" document setting out the parameters for a new constitution for the NHS, which also included a set of patients' rights.
Although the European Union has traditionally taken a back seat in health matters, last October it launched a new campaign, "European Health at the Service of Patients". The campaign was to support patients' rights, primarily through the dissemination of better information to patients.
In 2001, a US senator, John McCain, made a concerted attempt at passing laws to protect patient access to care, but the laws failed to pass through Congress. Since then, efforts to secure legal safeguards for patients have proceeded on a piecemeal basis, for different disease areas and on different issues. For example, in October 2008 new federal regulations were passed restricting Medicare payments to hospitals for the extra care required for patients with a hospital-acquired infection, the intention being to force hospitals to improve standards. The move was instigated following widespread campaigning by the US Consumers Union.
