Assesment of the feasability of legal demands for a physician

Santrauka

Feasability is a basic requirement for any legal provision. According to this demand issuing such a provision it is obligatory to ensure all preconditions that are necessary for person to be able to follow it (necessary time, skills, information, etc.). Feasibility problems are especially important, if the new legal provision brings significant increase demands to the affected individual, for example, requires additional effort, time, skills, finacial resources, etc. It is exactly what occurred in the Lithuanian health system during the first decade of the current century, especially, because of the inclusion into the medical law of two important requirements: maximal carefulness and conformity with the modern evidence based science. All these caused an unprecedented increase of the level of medical standards in this country. However, this “jump” of medical standards was not followed by related increase in recourses necessary to by able to ensure them. This caused a conflict between a rapid increase in demands to physician and its ability to complete them. This conflict has brought about a “feasability crisis” in Lithuanian health care. One of its manifestations is an evil “defence medicine”. A solution of feasibility problem should be the development of a legal and managerial mechanism ensuring adequacy between changes in legal demands for physicians, on the one side, and actions to ensure their feasibility.