By John Tingle and Amanda Cattini
In the hustle and bustle of our daily professional lives, it is sometimes all too easy to forget about the basics. In terms of health care practice and patient safety, these underpinning basic, foundational concepts include the need for proper patient communication strategies.
The consequences of failures in patient communication can be devastating. There is a need to go back to this basic issue at regular intervals.
By Alicia Ely Yamin and Chloe Reichel
In the years before the pandemic, and especially since the pandemic began, there have been increasing calls to decolonize global health. Setting aside what Ṣẹ̀yẹ Abímbọ́lá rightly characterizes as the slipperiness of both the terms “decolonizing” and “global health,” these calls speak to the need to reimagine governance structures, knowledge discourses, and legal frameworks — from intellectual property to international financial regulation.
Global health law itself, anchored in the International Health Regulations (2005), purports to present a universal perspective, but arguably rigidifies colonialist assumptions about the sources of disease, national security imperatives, priorities in monitoring “emergencies,” and governance at a distance. The diverse tapestry of international human rights scholarship related to health is often not reflected in analyses of the field from the economic North. In turn, that narrow vision of human rights has also increasingly faced critiques from TWAIL, Law & Political Economy, and other scholars, for blinkered analyses that fail to challenge the structural violence in our global institutional order — which the pandemic both laid bare and exacerbated.
In an attempt to enlarge discussion of these important topics and amplify diverse voices, the Petrie-Flom Center is welcoming four new affiliated researchers to the Global Health and Rights Project (GHRP).
By Cathy Zhang
Last week, on the heels of attacks on trans youth and their families in Texas, the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued a notice and guidance expressing support for transgender and gender nonconforming youth and highlighting the civil rights and privacy laws surrounding gender affirming care.
OCR all but names the Texas attacks as unlawful under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, and disability by federally funded health programs or activities. It notes that for federally funded entities, restricting medically necessary care on the basis of gender — such as doctors reporting parents of patients to state authorities — “likely violates Section 1557.”
The guidance directs those who have been discriminated against on the basis of gender identity or disability in seeking access to gender-affirming health care to file a complaint through OCR. HHS can go further, however, by formally acknowledging that individuals have a legal right to enforce Section 1557 when they have experienced prohibited health care discrimination.
By John Tingle
The clinical negligence system reform debate in England is proceeding at some pace now with the House of Commons Health and Social Care Select Committee recently receiving expert oral evidence.
The evidence has produced some excellent and controversial food for thought along with creating an important change agenda.
This post was originally published on the Verfassungsblog as part of our joint symposium on international pandemic lawmaking.
By Ilja Richard Pavone
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised unprecedented challenges for the global health framework and its long-term consequences are not yet in full sight. The legal and institutional regime aimed at preventing and controlling the spread of infectious diseases, grounded on the International Health Regulations (IHR) was heavily criticized.
The alarm mechanism based on the declaration of Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), in particular, has been severely tested. A PHEIC is an extraordinary event that constitutes a potential public health risk through the international spread of a disease outbreak. The WHO Director-General bases his decision to “ring the bell” upon the technical advice of an Emergency Committee (EC) carrying out “an assessment of the risk to human health, of the risk of international spread, and of the risk of interference with international traffic.”
A PHEIC, then, is declared only when an event is already sufficiently acute and has started to spread internationally. It is not an early warning, but a formal alert, and in the case of COVID-19 it was issued with extreme delay only on 30 January 2020, (one month after notification of early cases by the Chinese government), after Beijing had already adopted quarantine measures around the city of Wuhan, and draconian measures to curb the spread of the disease in the country had been announced.
This post was originally published on the Verfassungsblog as part of our joint symposium on international pandemic lawmaking.
By Raphael Oidtmann
The COVID-19 pandemic has (yet again) disclosed that, in contemporary international law, the notion of borders resembles a distinct emanation of legal fiction, i.e., “something assumed in law to be fact irrespective of the truth or accuracy of that assumption.” This characterization of international borders holds particularly true with a view towards managing, containing, and countering the spread of highly contagious pathogens: especially in the context of responding to the global COVID-19 pandemic, it has hence become apparent that the traditional conception of borders as physical frontiers has been rendered somewhat moot. On the contrary, the pandemic experience has proven that a more flexible, fluid, and functional understanding of (international) borders might be warranted, also with a view towards (re-)conceptualizing international health law.
This post was originally published on the Verfassungsblog as part of our joint symposium on international pandemic lawmaking.
By Ching-Fu Lin and Chuan-Feng Wu
The COVID-19 pandemic has blatantly exposed the flaws of the World Health Organization (WHO) and its International Health Regulations (IHR) in addressing cross-border communicable diseases. Commentators have examined the IHR’s decades of struggle in fulfilling its objectives to control cross-border pandemics such as COVID-19, pointing out problems over the level of obligation, precision of language, delegation of power, settlement of dispute, and lack of enforcement power, among others. What has been overlooked, however, is the crucial question of whether the institutional design of the IHR enables the WHO and its Member States to deliver good global pandemic governance.
We argue that the IHR is ill-designed: its rules and mechanisms are disproportionately tied to the Director General’s (DG) exercise of power, rendering insufficient member access to and participation in core decision-making and greater tendency of regulatory capture. For example, the IHR failed to facilitate the timely declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) due to the DG’s and the Emergency Committee’s misinterpretation and misapplication of rules allegedly driven by political considerations. On 23 January 2020, even when COVID-19 cases had already been found outside of China, thereby indicating the risk of cross-border transmission (IHR Article 12(4)(e)), the second meeting of the Emergency Committee decided to confine the definition of “international spread” to “having actual local spread of COVID-19 in a country beyond China,” instead of “having the potential for, or a risk of, cross-border transmission,” and refused to declare a PHEIC. The WHO is also criticized for abusing its bureaucratic influences to further the agendas of individual Member States like China, letting politics override science.
This post was originally published on the Verfassungsblog as part of our joint symposium on international pandemic lawmaking.
By Sara (Meg) Davis, Mike Podmore, and Courtenay Howe
What should the role of those most affected by pandemics be in future pandemic governance and co-ordination mechanisms?
Drawing on human rights standards and principles, and on existing structures in the HIV, TB and malaria sectors, we argue that the human right to participation should extend to permanent seats and votes for civil society and affected communities on governance boards.* Our argument is informed by an analysis by STOPAIDS, Aidsfonds, CSSN and Frontline AIDS, by consultations led by STOPAIDS, and by the examples of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria (“the Global Fund”), Unitaid, and the Access to Covid Technologies-Accelerator (ACT-A).
This post was originally published on the Verfassungsblog as part of our joint symposium on international pandemic lawmaking.
By Sharon Bassan
Piecemeal and fragmented policymaking during COVID-19 underscored the need for an equity-focused global health agenda. Several international health law mechanisms, such as the International Health Regulations (IHR) and “soft law” frameworks, try to bring together relevant stakeholders to the table, help ensure international sharing of medical information, and facilitate equitable distribution of the benefits of research in developing vaccines and therapeutics. Nevertheless, their application during COVID-19 did not result in an effective global governance. Most responses were nationally-focused, lacked global commitment and solidarity, failed to notify the WHO of novel outbreaks, and were non-compliant with its professional recommendations.
Many agree that the solution should be multileveled and structural — a result of the connection and cooperation between participants. The prism of the “shared responsibility model” provides an interesting opportunity to consider potential global health governance models for emergency actions. My refined version of the model is based on Iris Young and Christian Barry’s suggested models, and includes two pairs of parameters, engaging and assigning. Engaging parameters locate the involved actors, and explain why they are assigned responsibilities. Assigning parameters address the type of duties each actor bears, and the site where they are expected to take action.
By John Tingle
In patient safety terms in the NHS England, there have been positives and negatives over the past year to reflect on, and for 2022 there are interesting developments on the horizon. In this post I will discuss a small number of patient safety matters of major impact.