The Centre for Biomedical Ethics and Law of the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium is pleased to present to you this website on Patient Rights Legislation in all 27 EU Member States. The research in preparation of this website has been performed in the framework of the EuroGentest project. This is a five-year European Commission funded program that aims to develop the necessary infrastructure, tools, resources, guidelines and procedures that will lead to the establishment of harmonized, qualitative genetic services in Europe. Within EuroGentest our team is responsible for the legal aspects.
Harmonization of the technical aspects of genetic services in Europe requires a legal framework that respects the cultural, religious, philosophical and other domestic charachteristics of a given country and its population(s), but at the same thime conform to basic and universally accepted human rights. It is a permanent challenge to continuously supervise the legal developments regarding the promotion and protection of the rightts of patients and users of health services and to make the results of our research publicly available. This website aims to contribute to it.

EuroGentest is an EU-funded Network of Excellence (NoE) with 5 Units looking at all aspects of genetic testing - Quality Management, Information Databases, Public Health, New Technologies and Education. Through a series of initiatives EuroGentest encourages the harmonization of standards and practice in all these areas throughout the EU and beyond.

This website contains 3 groups of information:

Biomedicine Convention: On this section of the website you will find all kinds of information on the Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine which plays an important role in protecting patient rights in Europe

EU Member States: This section gives an overview of all the existing national pation rights legislation in the EU. The information is categorized by country and focuses on 'the right to informed consent', 'the right to information about his or her health', 'the rights regarding the medical file', 'the right to privacy', 'the right to complain and to compensation' and 'the rights of users of genetic services'.

Types of Patient Rights Legislation: On this section all the national patient rights legislation is categorized according to the types of legislation. The different categories are: special patient rights legislation/ split patient rights legislation, civil law/ public law, legal rights/ quasi-legal rights and the nominate treatment contract/ the innominate treatment contract.

Top