LEGAL AND ECONOMIC IMPLICATIONS OF MEDICAL DECISIONS IN THE CONTEXT OF COVID - 19 PANDEMIC

First Name
Crina
Last Name
Rădulescu
Institution/University
SNSPA
Co-authors
Teodora Bițoiu, SNSPA
Cristina Nicolescu, SNSPA
Paper/Abstract submission

The Covid-19 pandemic is a public health emergency, a defining global health crisis of our time, which can affect not only the health services, but also the medical personnel. As Arimany-Manso J, Martin-Fumadó C. (2020) have stated: “during the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare faces a different practice scenario than usual and professionals act within the framework of a health system conditioned by the crisis, with great pressure on care, in the face of a new pathology and new regulations enacted.”

The decisions that doctors make in this pandemic context have consequences, including in terms of the possibility of attracting their legal liability. Issues such as: the obligation to provide healthcare, the selection of patients for healthcare - discrimination, limitation of medical practice to one's own specialty, medical error and its consequences in the context of COVID-19 or informed patient consent are just some of the problems faced by the medical practice these days which can have complex legal implications. Medical practice is regulated by legal norms. Failure to do so will result in failure consequences for attracting the legal liability of medical staff. Establishment of the state of emergency, by adopting the Decree of the President of Romania no. 195/2020, brought and can bring changes to the current legal norms, by adoption of new ones.

On the other hand, the public decisions during the health crisis must strongly juggle with the cost-coverage-choice trilemma. If under normal circumstance, at least one of the three must be sacrifice, a crisis asks for tricky decisions: should you want to control costs, you must both limit patients’ choice and be unable to ofer universal coverage.

The paper’s structure is two-folded: on one hand, the theoretical framework provides us with a better understanding of the way the medical practice is regulated and what are the implications of the new norms generated by the pandemic and on the other hand, the paper presents an analysis of the practical implications of the medical practice and of the costs that could be saved so to keep the trilemma with only one C sacrificed. In terms of methodology, the paper uses both a qualitative research for the theoretical background needed to substantiate the argument of the entire research. 

Keywords: healthcare system, liability, pandemic, cost, coverage, choice