State and Professional Autonomy: Conflicting Rights and Obligations in the State-Profession Relationship

Abstract

This talk considers the ethical and legal relationship between healthcare professions and the state in the context of the Hong Kong response to COVID-19. In particular, it queries the extent that nurses and doctors, as members of state-sanctioned professions, are able (and perhaps even under obligation) to challenge the decisions of the state on the control and treatment of the infectious disease. In this respect, the paper seeks to broaden the discussions in the ethical and legal literature on the state-professional relationship in healthcare, which has primarily focused on appropriate health workforce regulation for the purposes of ensuring patient safety and quality of care. Although nurses and doctors are neither trained nor equipped to mobilise an all-of-society response that is needed for a pandemic, it is envisaged that they could have a greater role in addressing collection action problems that relate to public health and in the shaping of a response to the next pandemic.