104年度委託辦理「探討病人自主權國際趨勢與我國立法可行性之研究計畫」

A lot of countries around the world actively promote Advance Care Planning (ACP) in recent years in hope of reducing the conflicts among patients, their families, and their health care teams. After the implementation of Hospice Palliative Care Act, Taiwan had made enormous progresses in the medical decision making for end of life care. In order to study the feasibility of furthering health care autonomy in Taiwan, we need to conduct a literature review of the legal framework of health care autonomy to understand the international trend and compare the laws and practices in the more advance countries in this regard. It is also necessary to collect the comments of all concerned locally to propose patient autonomy protocols that are consistent with Taiwan’s culture of biomedical ethics so as to ameliorate the conflicts between patient autonomy and right to life, and to maintain human dignity and individuality. This study will conduct a literature review of the legal framework of patient autonomy. The plan is to analyze the status of Great Britain, United States of America, European Union and Japan in this aspect. We also plan to hold a public hearing and symposiums to gather comments from various civil societies, scholars and experts. In order to propose patient autonomy protocols that are consistent with Taiwan’s culture of biomedical ethics, qualitative analyses will be conducted by applying content analyses and Delphi technique. The goals are to come up with a draft of patient autonomy act, analyze its implication, and suggest alternatives in the case of not enacting a special law.