Medical Law Review

When a system comes under strain, the persons most likely to suffer from the repercussions are those at and beyond its margins, as the age-old rule 'Help yourself before helping others' typically guides crisis management within the system. Similar behavioural patterns on the side of policy-makers have left a distinct mark on the healthcare rights of forced migrants in the context and aftermath of the so-called 'migration crisis' of 2015-2016, as this article demonstrates. Following the crisis, this group of persons, who are traditionally situated at the margins of society already, have been pushed further outside social and healthcare systems through increasingly restrictive incorporation policies across Europe...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Medicine is one of the biggest use cases for emerging information technologies. Data processing brings huge advantages but forces lawmakers and practitioners to balance between privacy, autonomy, accessibility, and functionality. ICT-connected Implantable Medical Devices plant themselves firmly between traditional medical equipment and software that processes health-related personal data, and these implants face many data management challenges. It is essential that healthcare providers and others can identify and understand the legal grounds they rely on to process data...

Several COVID-19 vaccinations have been authorised worldwide. Whilst some vaccines are contraindicated for certain age groups or health conditions, there are often multiple clinically suitable authorised vaccine brands available. Few states have allowed recipients to choose amongst them, though there are multiple reasons why choice would be valued. We consider the policy justifications for state controls on recipient choice amongst COVID-19 vaccine brands, focusing on European countries and drawing on the UK context as an example...

Linking records could serve as a useful tool for scientific research and as a facilitator for local policymaking. This article examines the challenges and opportunities for researchers to lawfully link routinely collected health and education data with cohort data of children when using it as a tool for scientific research in Portugal. Such linking can be lawfully conducted in Portugal if three requirements are met. First, data processing pursues a legitimate purpose, such as scientific research. Secondly, data linking complies with the legal obligations of research entities and researchers, acting as data controllers or processors, and it respects the rights of children as data subjects...

The adversarial nature of medical negligence litigation is subject to frequent criticism by the media, patient advocates, and scholars. In Ireland, reform of the medical negligence dynamic is often mooted, particularly in response to the high financial costs of this type of litigation; however, change in this area has been slow. Recently, the Irish courts have dealt with a number of high-profile, medical negligence disputes, including claims for those affected by the CervicalCheck controversy, which involved the failure to disclose the results of a retrospective audit to women who had developed cervical cancer...

How can caregivers' interests be balanced with disability rights in decisions about whether to sterilise an intellectually disabled person? This question is considered in the context of Singapore, a commonwealth country that lacks a test case. Singapore has a lesser-known history of eugenics, and has struck an uneasy compromise between communitarian values and obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in recent years. This article provides an overview of Singaporean law under the Voluntary Sterilisation Act 1974 and the Mental Capacity Act 2008, and compares this with the law in Canada, England and Wales, and Australia...

Global social movements for justice have called for better legal responses to the harms of inequality. These inequalities have traditionally been dealt with in the political sphere and legal measures to address them have taken little account of emerging knowledge about the biological impact of unequal treatment. We use the concept 'bioinequalities' to foreground the relationship increasingly articulated in studies that show that social stress and trauma associated with unequal treatment have a significant epigenetic and intergenerational impact on the body...

In 2020, the German Federal Constitutional Court declared unconstitutional and void a 2015 criminal law penalising suicide assistance in a recurring fashion and called into existence a right to a self-determined death, including the use of suicide services, where available. Due to subsequent legislative inaction, no holistic assisted dying legislation offering protection for vulnerable individuals is currently in place in Germany. Calls have been made for law reform in this area. This article contemplates the possible scope of a future assisted dying framework in Germany...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Action needs to be taken to map out the fairest way to meet the needs of all NHS stakeholders in the post-pandemic 'new normal'. In this article, we review the NHS Constitution, looking at it from a relational perspective and suggesting that it offers a useful starting point for such a project, but that new ways of thinking are required to accommodate the significant changes the pandemic has made to the fabric of the NHS. These new ways of thinking should encompass concepts of solidarity, care, and (reciprocal) responsibility, grounded in an acceptance of the importance of relationships in society...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

In English law, legal motherhood is allocated to the person who gestated. However, we argue that gestation-legally denoted as the "natural" source of parenting obligations-is often constructed as mothering, rather than the precursor to it. This means that women and pregnant people are treated as mothers prior to birth in legal and medical contexts. Since legal motherhood is an important status, defining the role an individual plays in a child's life, the conflation of gestation and motherhood does not reflect that, legally, a fetus does not have personhood...

This article outlines the Australian legal position relevant to minors and the commencement of hormone treatment for Gender Dysphoria (GD). It traces the significant Australian legal developments in this field and compares the Australian jurisprudence with recent English caselaw. In Quincy Bell and Mrs A v The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust and Ors, the English High Court held that minors below 16 years are not likely to have the requisite competency to lawfully consent to the commencement of puberty suppressing drugs...

Social determinants of health are the social and economic conditions that have a determining impact on health at an individual and population level. Working within this framework, in 2019 the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University and The Lancet published The legal determinants of health: Harnessing the power of law for global health and sustainable development. This report identifies and promotes four legal determinants: provision of universal health coverage under the Sustainable Development Goals; governance of national and global health institutions; implementation of evidence-based health interventions; and building legal capacity...

This article discusses the human rights of residents in care homes in England who were affected by restrictions that were imposed during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to safeguard health and life at a time of public health emergency. It focuses on the potentially adversarial relationship between the need to protect the health of these residents and the possible adverse interferences with their human rights in the initial phase of the pandemic. The scope and application of these rights to the healthcare context is not straightforward due to the exigencies of the pandemic...

Clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) are digital healthcare information systems that apply algorithms to patient data to generate tailored recommendations. They are designed to support, but neither dictate nor execute, clinical decisions. CDSSs can introduce new risks, both by design features that heighten clinician burden and by outright errors that generate faulty recommendations for care. In the latter instance, if such unintercepted recommendations were to result in harm to the patient, novel legal questions emerge...