Prawa pacjenta w czasie pandemii – wybrane zagadnienia
Patient rights during a pandemic – selected issues

Summary/Abstract: On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced a pandemic of the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 disease. In Poland, the first case of the coronavirus was detected on March 4, 2020, and on March 20, 2020, an epidemic was announced in connection with SARS-CoV-2 virus infections. Since then, the daily life of people around the world has changed dramatically. To this day, we feel the consequences of the new and unpredictable epidemiological situation. Particularly severe effects of the pandemic are observed in the health care system. This applies to all countries, both those where the provision of health services is at a high level, as well as underdeveloped countries that have previously struggled with problems in this area. The epidemiological situation also influenced the realization of patients’ rights. According to Art. 5 of the Act on Patient Rights and the Patient’s Rights Ombudsman, the head of the entity providing health services, or a doctor authorized by him may limit the exercise of patient rights in the event of an epidemic threat or due to the health safety of patients, and in the case of the right to personal, telephone or correspondence contact with other persons also due to the organizational possibilities of the entity. This work analyzes the issues related to the limitation of patients’ rights based on the referred Article 5. However, the subject of consideration will not be the issues related to, inter alia, with limitation of the right to health services, which were caused by changes in applicable regulations, and not by the decision of the head of the medical entity. In these cases, medical entities were obliged to comply with the applicable regulations and managers of entities providing health services were not able to make different decisions. The aim of this paper is to indicate the limitations of patients’ rights under the mentioned Article and their consequences.

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