Latvia - Law on Patients Rights Adopted
- Latvia
- 03/29/2010
- Raidla & Partners
On 17 December 2009, the Latvian Parliament has finally (after three years of debating) passed the Law on Patients Rights that will enter into force on the 1 March 2010. The new law aims to solve some of the problems existing in the health care sector in Latvia, e.g., occasional failure to provide patents with complete and comprehensible information concerning the course of treatment or examination, the unfounded refusal to accept the patients for the treatments in hospitals, as well as unwillingness of some family doctors to carry the home appointments and failure to direct the patients to the competent specialist doctors. The new Law on Patents Rights formulates the basic patents rights, such as the right to the get the medical treatment, right to access all the information related to the treatment and examination, right to choose the medical institution, right to accept or refuse the treatment, etc.
When drafting Law on Patients Rights special attention has been granted to the protection of the patients’ personal data, as well as to the limitations to the general prohibition to disclose the personal data of the patient. Although the Law on Patients Rights states that the protection of the patient’s personal data shall be carried in accordance with the general regulation applicable to the personal data protection, it also establishes the specific circumstances (such as, for instance, research or statistics) when some personal data may be provided also without the prior written approval of the patient.
