CHAPTER 6: INFORMED CONSENT IN CROATIA TODAY: BIOETHICAL AND LEGAL ASPECTS

Abstract

After obtaining political independence in the early 1990s, Croatia started to regulate numerous social sectors and issues, including health care. More intensive European integration efforts in the late 1990s, provided a new moment for the 1997 Europen Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, followed in 2004 by the first national Act on the Protection of Patients’ Rights. Today, the introduction of the right to co-decison making can be seen as a step forward and a milestone in patients’ rights regulation in Croatia.
However, such a claim has to face some reconsiderations, mainly due to formal (mis)understanding of the 2004 Act and the lack of its understanding by its users, both patients and physicians. If at some time the co-decision right did serve as an impetus to bioethics in Croatia, more than 10 years later, it faces deficiences due to a lack of the legal support.In this article, we follow the period after the passing of the first Act on the Protection of Patients’ Rights in 2004, trying to elucidate pros and cons of the Act, including its contribution to the development of bioethics in Croatia, but also legal omissions of its implementation.