Doctors' responsibilities: patients' rights

Doctors’ Responsibilities: Patients’ Rights looks at patients’ rights in the context of decision-making. We consider the impact of the European Convention on Human Rights; the Human Rights Act 1998 and their expression in the NHS Constitution. We consider the difficult matter of resource allocation, the role of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and reliance on the ‘Quality Adjusted Life Year’ (QALY) – a resource allocation tool that measures the quality of the patient’s remaining life-years.