Patients trust their doctors with the most important decisions of their lives. That doesn’t mean that the doctors are allowed to do whatever they want to the patients. The Patient bill of rights was introduced in 1973 by the American government to safeguard the patients’ rights. Before this law, the patients treated their doctors as Gods, due to which several people suffered from medical negligence, financial theft, and malpractice. Unfortunately, these practices emotionally destabilize many patients. To encounter these situations, the patients have certain rights, including getting all the knowledge of their treatment explained and getting permission for every payment and procedure they have to go through. If you are a patient and have enrolled in a hospital, you should take care of the basic rights explained in this article. So, here are a few things you need to protect your legal rights at a hospital.
1. Understand Your Basic Rights
Before deciding on your hospital service, you should know your basic rights so that no one can threaten you. When the law gives you your due respect, you have to benefit from it and make sure you know all the rules properly. This way, no hospital service will be able to manipulate you and take advantage of you. So, learn all these basic laws to help you safeguard your medical services:
- The right to respectful care by the caretakers and workers.
- The right to privacy.
- The right to know the medical records.
- The right to professional and good quality caregiving services.
- The right to decide your treatment procedures.
- The right to refuse the use of drugs or any high medications.
- The right to get a second or third opinion from other doctors.
- The right to get protection from sexual harassment, discrimination, and other social evils.
- The right to get comfortable treatment, accommodation, and restroom.
- The right to get billing receipts before and after procedures.
- The right to hire a medical and legal advisor.
- The right to practice religion in-hospital care.
- The right to take action against financial exploitation.
- The right to see visitors and family members.
- The right to give reviews about healthcare services.
2. Choose Your Legal Advocates and Visitors
The patients suffering from extraordinary injuries or medical conditions like paralysis or heart attacks, bone fractures, etc., are manipulated and used easily by the criminal or fraud hospital services. Since these patients could not move on their own and are vulnerable to their disabilities, many hospital workers take advantage of the situation and make the policy that ensures the visitors and family members are not allowed with the patients.
In addition, many doctors also trick the patients into signing property or financial documents to get access to their bank accounts and other financial assets with false billing charges. That’s why patients suffering from severe medical conditions give their responsibility to a professional medical malpractice lawyer, who ensures the hospital works properly and provides all the necessary treatments to these patients. So, if your hospital services don’t take care of the patients’ right to see the visitors and family members according to their choice, you can bring legal help.
3. Analyze the Medical Procedures
Another way to protect your legal rights in a hospital is to analyze the hospital’s medical procedures and customer services. Most hospitals pretend to give you all the advanced medications and technology with the best doctors. However, they lack in maintaining the quality of their medicines, professional doctors, and other services. That’s why it’s important to analyze every minor detail critically before getting any medical treatment done from a hospital.
4. Get Treatment From a Professional
Getting the right treatment from a professional doctor is your basic right. So make sure you choose the right professional for your treatment. If your doctors are good communicators and give you due respect, you can easily share your problems and symptoms with them without any hesitation. Moreover, you can also recover quickly if your doctor gives you sufficient time to ask about your health and symptoms and treat them with the right procedures.
5. Demand Emergency Care
Every other hospital and health care provider should have an emergency ward, staff, and doctors to treat unstable patients at any time. Since if your healthcare institution lacks the best treatment at the right time, you can face greater consequences and sometimes death. Therefore, it’s your basic right to select any hospital for treatment with professional healthcare and licensed doctors.
Fighting for your rights will not be easy if you don’t know the basic legalities and rights the federal and state government provides you. So it’s better to understand your rights as a patient and analyze the services of the hospitals according to them. As a result of knowing your basic rights, you can take legal help at the right time before the fallacious medical facilities try to harm you with any other strategy.