Right to Health and Proportion of Right to Health Information in the Patient’s Right Charters

Review Of Literatures

A review of literature showed a research gap in comparing the proportion of right to health information in international, national (Iranian nation) conventions and patients’ right charters. Most of the published studies dealt with the perception of right to informed consent or in other words right to information rather than right to health information in particular. A brief synopsis of studies from different aspects of right to information is presented here.

A Japanese study (Hattori et al., 1991), showed that legal rules and doctor's opinions using questionnaire survey concerning informed consent showed that even though Japanese physicians are willing to obtain informed consent from patients, the discretion of the physician to provide information is still prevalent. Japanese physicians believe that information regarding the treatment to be administrated should be fully disclosed both in cases when the treatment is still experimental and when it is established among specialists. Finally, the survey showed that despite the liberal attitude of the Japanese physicians toward informed consent, they are reluctant to make medical records accessible to the patients.