How does national culture affect citizens’ rights of access to personal health information and informed consent?

Two widely discussed and debated aspects of health law literature are ‘informed’ consent to medical treatment and the right of access to personal health information. Both are tied to the larger subject of patients’ rights, including the right to privacy. This article looks at the issue of informed consent internationally, and goes further to explain some of the inequalities across the world with respect to informed consent and patients’ rights legislation via an analysis of the take-up of key legislative attributes in patient consent. Specifically, the effect that national culture, as defined by the GLOBE variables, has on the rate and pattern of adoption of these consent elements is analysed using binary logistic regression to provide evidence of the existence or otherwise of a cultural predicate of the legislative approach. The article concludes by outlining the challenges presented by these differences.

[1]  T. Caulfield,et al.  Canadian health law and policy , 2002 .

[2]  T. Beauchamp,et al.  Principles of biomedical ethics , 1991 .

[3]  Sandra J. Milberg,et al.  Information Privacy: Corporate Management and National Regulation , 2000 .

[4]  T. Gladwin.  Culture's Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values , 1981 .

[5]  L. Gostin,et al.  National health information privacy: regulations under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. , 2001, JAMA.

[6]  Annie I. Antón,et al.  Examining Internet privacy policies within the context of user privacy values , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management.

[7]  P. Dorfman,et al.  UNDERSTANDING CULTURES AND IMPLICIT LEADERSHIP THEORIES ACROSS THE GLOBE: AN INTRODUCTION TO PROJECT GLOBE , 2002 .

[8]  Ellen Rose,et al.  An examination of the concern for information privacy in the New Zealand regulatory context , 2006, Inf. Manag..

[9]  Katarina Steinwachs,et al.  Information and culture - the impact of national culture on information processes , 1999, J. Inf. Sci..

[10]  P. A. B. Galpottage,et al.  Patient consent principles and guidelines for e-consent: a New Zealand perspective , 2005, Health Informatics J..

[11]  J. Rubenfeld.  The Right of Privacy , 1989 .

[12]  G. Hofstede.  Culture′s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations , 2001 .

[13]  H. Leino‐Kilpi,et al.  Patients' autonomy in surgical care: a comparison of nurses' perceptions in five European countries. , 2003, International nursing review.

[14]  H. Leino‐Kilpi,et al.  Perceptions of Informed Consent in the Care of Elderly People in Five European Countries , 2003, Nursing ethics.

[15]  Felix B. Tan,et al.  Beyond Models of National Culture in Information Systems Research , 2002, J. Glob. Inf. Manag..

[16]  G. Hofstede,et al.  Culture′s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values , 1980 .

[17]  Gerald L. Lohse,et al.  International Differences in Information Privacy Concerns: A Global Survey of Consumers , 2004, Inf. Soc..

[18]  Desmond J. Higham,et al.  An Algorithmic Introduction to Numerical Simulation of Stochastic Differential Equations , 2001, SIAM Rev..

[19]  Gerald L. Lohse,et al.  International differences in information privacy concern: Implications for the globalization of electronic commerce , 2004 .

[20]  Antonis C. Stylianou,et al.  Global corporate web sites: an empirical investigation of content and design , 2003, Inf. Manag..

[21]  Louis D. Brandeis,et al.  The Right to Privacy , 1890 .