Patients & Rights
1973
The Patient's Bill of Rights
In February 1973 the American Hospital Association approved a twelve-point statement of what hospital patients could expect, from respectful care to refusing treatment. The Joint Commission later required hospitals to tell every patient their rights, and by 2006, 23 states had such laws.
The statement was drafted by a committee of the American Hospital Association's board of trustees, its Committee on Health Care for the Disadvantaged. The association's House of Delegates approved it on 6 February 1973, and the journal Hospitals printed it on 16 February. A 2009 review in the Journal of General Internal Medicine calls it the first patients' bill of rights. George Annas gives that place to 26 demands drafted in June 1970 by the National Welfare Rights Organization, the first full statement of patients' rights from the consumer's side; parts of it were written into the revised standards of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals.
The statement listed twelve rights, among them respectful care, the information needed for informed consent, refusal of treatment, privacy, confidentiality, refusal to take part in research, continuity of care and an explanation of the bill. It also allowed information about a patient's condition to go to the family instead when telling the patient was not medically advisable. The 1992 revision dropped that clause and added the rights to make advance directives and to review one's medical records.
It drew comment within weeks. Willard Gaylin wrote on it in the Saturday Review of the Sciences on 24 February 1973, and George Annas published an article that September in the Hastings Center Report under the title "The patient has rights. How can we protect them?" In December 1973 the Canadian Medical Association Journal reported that the Medical Society of Nova Scotia had approved a bill of rights for hospital patients. Annas later judged the AHA list vague and incomplete, with no means of enforcement.
The American Hospital Association revised the statement in 1992 and later paired it with a version written for patients, Your Rights as a Patient; its successor today is The Patient Care Partnership. In the 1990s the Joint Commission made informing every patient of their rights a national standard for hospital accreditation. A 2006 survey found that 23 states had a patients' bill of rights statute for the general public; all of them set up a grievance process, four gave patients a private right to sue and one set fines.
Keep exploring
All 526 moments in the history of medicine. This one is in chapter 6, Trials, scanners and rights