Practice and law around informed consent in healthcare have undergone a revolution for the better over recent decades. However the way we obtain informed consent remains problematic and is imbued with irreducible but not ineliminable uncertainty. The reasons for this uncertainty are varied. The uncertainty is partly due to the conceptual opacity of important core concepts. The complexity of communication in clinical encounters is another. The role of autonomy, and the changing nature of the clinician patient relationship, have also contributed to this uncertainty remaining. This thesis is not a panacea for these difficulties. However there have been two quite profound revolutions in healthcare over the last decade or so, namely, the introduction of evidence-based medicine into clinical decision making, and the institutionalization of clinical governance and the application of quality improvement philosophy. I have examined ways in which these two “movements” can help in reducing some of the uncertainty in the practice of informed consent.

Numerous separate legal norms dealing with the individual spheres of everyday life exist in the Czech Republic at present; some acts mutually overleap and complement one another. Provision of healthcare and healthcare services is regulated by numerous international and national regulations in compliance with adherence to the basic human rights. The healthcare law issues are particularly dealt with by Act No. 372/2011 Col. on healthcare services and the conditions of their prevision, which became effective on 1 April 2012 and substituted Act No. 20/1966 Col. on people health care. Acceptance of the Healthcare Service Act completed the post-revolution changes in healthcare. The Act represents a relatively comprehensive system of rules, among others it regulates the rights and obligations of patients, healthcare providers and healthcare staff in provision of healthcare services. Recodification of the private law was completed in 2012. Act No. 89/2012 Col., the Civil Code was passed within that. It became effective on 1 January. This thesis is divided into five chapters including the conclusion. The first chapter tries to outline the development of the legal norms in healthcare and social sphere in our country. The development of the social-healthcare policy of the state from the late 19th century was later slowed down by the world economy crisis, the Second World War and the consequent normalization. The second chapter gives a brief introduction in the healthcare issues and is divided into several subchapters. It defines the basic terms health and disease. It specifies the individual models of human approach to health, the structure of the Czech healthcare; a part of the chapter deals with the physician-patient relation, particularly with its modification from the paternalistic approach of a physician to a patient to the partnership relation, in which a physician and a patient become equal partners. The third chapter introduces the international and national regulations forming a part of the current healthcare legislation. This legal norm expresses the willingness of the society not only in the Czech Republic to protect the basic values of a human being in healthcare provision. The fourth part of the thesis focuses in detail on selected spheres of provision of healthcare and healthcare services under the effectiveness of Act No. 372/2011 Col. on Healthcare Services and the newly passed Act No. 89/2012 Col., the Civil Code. The new regulation introduces a new type of contractual relation, a contract of healthcare, which should regulate the legal mode of the healthcare provision, including the position of a healthcare provider and a patient in healthcare provision. It also includes a complex regulation of intervention into natural person's integrity and the necessity of his/her agreement with such an intervention. This part of the thesis examines the relation between the Healthcare Service Act and the new Civil Code. The aim of the thesis was to map the previous and the new healthcare legislations and to specify the basic differences in the legal norms, and to assess the consequences of the changes in the regulations for a patient upon comparison of both the legal norms. This thesis is a theoretical one, based on detailed studying and on a content analysis of particularly regulations, specialized literature and further available sources. The conclusion, i.e. the fifth chapter summarizes selected problems of provision of healthcare and healthcare services. The new civil code is based on the requirements of the modern society and provides much higher improvement of patient rights. This levels the legal positions of both the involved subjects, the physician and the patient. Healthcare provision is however primarily regulated by the Act on Healthcare Service Provision and the Conditions of their Provision, namely in more detail than by the new Civil Code, which is in the subsidiarity relation to the special regulation.

No / The World Health Organization (WHO) was intended to serve at the forefront of efforts to realize human rights to advance global health, and yet this promise of a rights-based approach to health has long been threatened by political constraints in international relations, organizational resistance to legal discourses, and medical ambivalence toward human rights. Through legal research on international treatyobligations, historical research in the WHO organizational archives, and interview research with global health stakeholders, this research examines WHO's contributions to (and, in many cases, negligence of) the rights-based approach to health. Based upon such research, this article analyzes the evolving role of WHO in the development and implementation of human rights for global health, reviews the current state of human rights leadership in the WHO Secretariat, and looks to future institutions to reclaim the mantle of human rights as a normative framework for global health governance. (C) 2013 The Royal Society for Public Health. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.