THE INDONESIAN LEGAL AND HUMAN RIGHTS PROTECTION
ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEDICAL PRACTITIONERS
AND THE PATIENTS
By : Atho B. Smith
The change of the Indonesian medical practitioners and public health services has lately oriented from humanity minded to business minded which constitutes one of the social phenomena establishing apprehensive situation the medical practitioners and hospitals in the country. It seems that the legal and human rights protection are not sufficiently promising in solving such risky problem.
Consequently, the patients were often treated inhumanly and discriminatively, because of the profit chasing by the physicians and the hospitals management. The patients natural rights easily violated by the physicians or other medical and health practitioners especially in the hospitals, or in public health centers here in Indonesia. The Hippocratic Oath that served as an ideal for the professional attitude and ethics of physicians for human interests to the present, deliberately ignored. The sayings that physicians should work professionally for the sake of the humanity or public interest, regardless of the service payment, has in reality not been proved yet. This worried social reality is a common view found in the major hospitals and health service centers in this country.
Under analyzing based on the qualitative normative research, it indicates that the economic, cultural, security legal, education, and environmental problems are the main factors influencing the moral values.
However, the change of the practitioners mental attitude in the health service which previously are more directed towards “profit-taking” should be admitted a an influence of the people’s social development complexities where much factors have colored their national individualism profile with the manifestations illustrated in the unsynchronized attitude of moral values as are required by the Professional Ethic Codes and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The paternalistic attitude of te majority of the Indonesian society who believed that only physicians are the people who are able to overcome diverse problems in the field of health, constitutes a phenomenon that has aggrevated the situation.
Apparently, the actions of human rights violation in the field of health and medical care have actually occurred when the patient rights were evaded in some cases, such as the right to get information, the rights to give consent (informed consent), the right to choose a physician as helper, etc. In case a therapy of maltreatment has been committed by the medical practitioners or malpractice for instance, it is hard to make litigation in supporting the patients rights as a legal summon before the court, because the physicians usually argued that they have worked according to the standard of Medical Ethic Code.
The Indonesian Act of Human Rights Protections No.39/1999, The Act of Consumers Rights Protection No.8/1999, and the Health Care Act No.23/1992, preserved by the government of Indonesia for the health and Human Rights protections seemingly have not given much improvements in helping health and medical services in Indonesia, whereas those regulations are considered as having sufficient powerful and representative social tool for the intentions. One of the reasons is that it was caused by the unserious actions and weaknesses of the Indonesia law enforcement and officers capacities.
Principally, the physician and their patients relationship are binded by the Professional Ethic Code (Kode Etik Profesi) based on ethics, aesthetics, logics, religion, and law principles. Thus, the legal guarantee and human rights protection to both sides are firmly guarded. However, most of the physicians has an “privilege access” by which they considered as a “right” not as “responsibility”. So, this mistaken attitude considered by the physicians have potentially produced a prolonged unbalanced social and cultural situation and the change in this attitude inflicts a loss upon the patients.
