Patient's rights charter in Iran

Given the importance of patient's rights in healthcare, special attention has been given to the concept of patient's rights by the Ministry of Health and Medical Education in Iran. Iranian patient's rights charter has been compiled with a novel and comprehensive approach. This charter aims to elucidate rights of recipients of health services as well as observing ethical standards in medicine. This paper presents the Iranian patient's rights charter. Based on a study done from 2007 to 2009, the charter has been finalized through an extensive consultation involving all stakeholders, patients, physicians, nurses, lawyers, patient associations and health policy makers. The developed charter was adopted by the Ministry of Health in December 2009. Iranian patient's rights charter has been formulated in the framework of 5 chapters and 37 articles including vision and an explanatory note. The five chapters concern right to receiving appropriate services, right to access desired and enough information, right to choose and decide freely about receiving healthcare, right to privacy and confidentiality, and finally right to access an efficient system of dealing with complaints which have been explained in 14, 9, 7, 4 and 3 articles, respectively. The paper concludes that, adopting the patient's rights charter is a valuable measure to meet patient's rights; however, a serious challenge is how to implement and acculturate observing patient's rights in practice in our healthcare system in Iran

[ necessity of compiling the organ transplantation ethical guideline in Iran: along with a brief report of Asian task force on organ trafficking]

In recent years, policy makers and health authorities have taken various steps to address organ demand in Iran. As a result of extensive efforts, including the adaptation of the controlled living unrelated donation program for kidney transplantation, the kidney transplant waiting list has been eliminated since 1999. Currently, the Iranian model of kidney transplantation is a culturally-adapted organ procurement system. However, we need to re-examine the current system and to strengthen it from the aspect of ethics. For this reason, it is necessary to compile an ethical guideline for organ transplantation. In this paper, the importance of the issue will be emphasized and some suggestions will be pointed out. We will also state a brief report of the first and the second Asian Task force on Organ Trafficking which was held in Taipei, in July, 2007 and January, 2008. Undoubtedly, a comprehensive practical ethical guideline consisting of a special attention to the prevention of kidney diseases, enhancing cadaveric donation, motivating altruistic donation, reinforcing ethical evaluation and supervision, and supporting donors' and recipients' rights would be very helpful for supporting the current system