Completed Research Projects
Title: Informed consent - legal and ethical aspects
Researchers: Tomáš Doležal, Adam Doležal
Duration: 2018-2023
Project description: Informed consent is a process for getting permission before conducting a healthcare intervention on a person. Healthcare providers are dealing with the procedure of obtaining informed consent from patients every day. Foreign philosophers and lawyers have created an enormous literature addressing the themes of personal autonomy, self-determination, and informed consent. Despite obvious practical impact of this phenomenon on the daily practice, there is enormous lack of Czech scientific literature on this topic. Informed consent is a little bit hybrid concept which speaks both to physicians´ disclosure obligations and patients´ willingness to undergo a particular treatment. Both elements and their historical background shall be analysed in this project. We will also mention differences between history of legal notion and ethical notion of informed consent. From this point we will consider necessarily and sufficient components of informed consent in legal and ethical discourse. Project will also focus on problematic aspects of informed consent de lege lata.
Title: Strategy AV 21: Society in Motion and Public Policy
Researchers: Tomáš Doležal, Adam Doležal, Ivo Smrž, David Černý
Duration: 2021-2024
Project description: Ethics and responsibility form a major area of inquiry within our research. Modern technologies increasingly challenge traditional notions of personal responsibility. In classical ethical theory, responsibility is typically attributed to a human being—someone who is accountable for their actions and liable for the consequences they cause.
However, as early as the 20th century, questions began to emerge about whether responsibility could, in some sense, also be attributed to non-human subjects, such as animals. In the contemporary era, these boundaries are further expanding to include non-living entities—particularly autonomous technological systems. Advances in science and technology inevitably raise the possibility of broadening the concept of a "responsible agent" to include robots or other autonomous machines capable of independent decision-making.
This research program also explores entirely new dimensions of responsibility—specifically, human responsibility for the environment and for future generations.
Title: Damages for personal injury and collateral benefits - compensatio lucri cum damno
Researchers: Tomáš Doležal, Ivo Smrž
Duration: 2021-2025
Project description: The project was aimed at the questions related to the deduction of collateral benefits from damages for personal injury. Abroad, this issue is known as compensatio lucri cum damno. In general, it regards situations in which the damaging event does cause not only the damage, but also give rise to some kind of benefit (advantage) for the injured party. Compensatio lucri cum damno represents one of the key issues in the theory and practice of the tort law with important implications for understanding the entire system of damages. It is astonishing that no one has dealt with this issue in the Czech Republic so far, despite its significant theoretical and practical potential. However, this project does not deal with the issue of compensatio lucri cum damno in its entirety, but it is reduced to the personal damages area. The project shall answer the key question of whether it is permissible and generally appropriate to take into account benefits obtained from the damaging event when determining the extent of damages.
Title: Decicion-making process on health care at the end of life
Researchers: Tomáš Doležal, Adam Doležal, David Černý (as co-researchers)
Duration: 2019-2022
Project description: Our project was aimed at interdisciplinary research on end-of-life health care decision-making processes, with the goal of suggesting improvements. Within the project, we investigated all relevant aspects of these processes—clinical, ethical, psychological, and legal.
We analyzed existing modalities of health care decision-making at the end of life. Taking into account the situation in the Czech Republic, we developed new modalities for such decision-making. Using an interdisciplinary approach, we tested these modalities experimentally and modified them as needed. In the final phase, we proposed the validated modalities as recommendations for end-of-life health care decision-making processes.
Title: The Problems in the Proof of Causation in Medical Malpractice Cases
Researchers: Tomáš Doležal, Adam Doležal
Duration: 2012-2016
Project description: Medical errors are perceived very sensitively by the society.About 23% of the EU citizens assume that they have encountered medical errors personally or that a relative or a close friend has encountered such error. Yet, only a part of the injured persons resolves to sue for damages for the harm caused by a health-care facility. Again, only a tiny fraction of these injured persons will succeed in a potential lawsuit. The fundamental problem of most of these lawsuits is the problematic way of proving causality between an illegal act of a health-care facility and the harm sustained by the patient.n the case of medical disputes, this situation is not extraordinary as there are only few disputes where a court has not been confronted with the fact that it is almost impossible to determine the exact cause of a patient´s personal injury. These difficulties arise mainly from the fact that in many cases the cause of the origin of the personal injury has not been fully explained. One of the main aim of our research is to compare the regulation of this issues in CR and other foreign countries.
Title: Impact of European Human Rights Law on Health Law
Researchers: Tomáš Doležal (as co-researcher)
Duration: 2012-2016
Project description: The aim of the project was to identify and analyze the impact of European human rights law - stemming primarily from the European Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR) of 1950 as interpreted by the European Court for Human Rights - on health law, in particular law of medical intervention, in the Signatory States. Regard should, however, be taken also of the relevant Council of Europe sector conventions/soft-law and the evolution in European Union law. Moreover, the existing European protection standards should be compared with standards under universal instruments on human rights´protection where they exist. The project should firstly enable to ascertain which consequences result from European human rights law for legal systems of the Signatory States (with direct concern for further development of national health legislation and case-law). Secondly, the confrontation of these results with data on real application of the ECHR in national law helps to assess the real impact of the ECHR on the conduct of States in socially sensitive areas.