Quality of Medical Services as a Guarantee of the Right to Health Care

The article provides a comprehensive understanding of the legal regulation of the quality of medical care: in the public-legal sphere as a guarantee of ensuring the constitutional right to health care and from the point of view of the private-legal understanding of the proper quality of the service provided to meet public needs. The author states that the recognition of human life and health as the highest social value makes the choice in favor of human-centrism and patient-orientation in the process of providing medical care absolutely unalternative. This also applies to the reform of the health care system. However, the existing shortcomings and gaps in legal regulation do not allow us to convincingly assess the quality of medical services at the current stage as high or at least sufficient.

The criteria for the quality of medical services are summarized, namely: effectiveness (evidence-based); accessibility (both territorially and in terms of the availability of the necessary competent medical personnel, equipment, medicines); patient-orientation (compliance, the Calgary-Cambridge model of medical consultation); safety (proven profile of effectiveness and safety of all prescriptions).

It is emphasized that there are some problems in ensuring the quality of medical services, especially in terms of safety and evidence. A set of measures is proposed to reform the health care system, in particular, the introduction of such indicators of the quality of medical care as the assessment of the rational use of antibiotics and the fight against antibiotic resistance and the assessment of the balanced appointment of invasive treatment methods in the presence of alternative methods (in particular, intravenous and oral administration of drugs).

The article summarizes that high-quality medical care should be based on evidence-based data. Evidence-based is the primary criterion for assessing the balance and validity of decisions of medical professionals, and this principle has already been enshrined in organic legislation and at the level of medical care standards, but there is a lack of effective tools for assessing the quality of medical technologies from the point of view of their evidence-based. It is necessary to popularize evidence-based medicine, raise public awareness of the essence of evidence-based methods, and also increase the legal awareness of medical personnel.