PATIENT RIGHT AND ETHICS: AGREEMENT, OVERLAP, CONFLICT, AND MEDIATION

Abstract

Patient rights and medical ethics are central to contemporary healthcare practice. Both concepts aim to ensure respect, fairness, and protection in the clinical environment. While patient rights focus on legal and institutional guarantees, medical ethics provides the moral principles guiding professional behaviour. This paper examines how patient rights and ethics agree, overlap, and conflict, and how such tensions may be mediated. A qualitative, literature-based methodology was used, drawing on journal articles, international declarations, ethical frameworks, and case studies. The findings show that patient rights and ethics largely agree on fundamental values such as respect for autonomy, dignity, informed consent, confidentiality, and non-maleficence. They also overlap in their shared concern for justice, beneficence, and accountability in medical decision-making. However, significant conflicts emerge where the legal articulation of patient rights clashes with professional or moral duties, such as in cases of resource scarcity, refusal of life-saving treatment, or when confidentiality endangers public health. These conflicts are often shaped by cultural contexts, with Western emphasis on individual autonomy differing from African communal ethics that prioritise collective welfare. The paper argues that mediation between patient rights and ethics requires institutional, procedural, and cultural approaches. Strategies such as ethics committees, proportionality-based decision-making, shared decision-making models, patient advocacy, and policy reforms are recommended. Cross-cultural dialogue is also necessary to balance universal principles with local values. The study concludes that patient rights and ethics are not inherently opposed but are best understood as complementary frameworks whose conflicts can be constructively mediated to strengthen healthcare delivery.