Covid-19 Challenges: Socio-Legal Issues Concerning the Patient Rights and Privacy During the Pandemic Era

Patient privacy is a right guaranteed by law that allows patient to conceal their medical records. However, this rights only applies in normal conditions and does not apply during a pandemic. It is often being misunderstood that broad society decided to close their medical records during this pandemic. The closing of the medical record will potentially cause the difficulty in detecting the virus’ transmission. Moreover, the status of a patient recognized as pandemic-suspected is often being ignored by their family and ultimately brought home assuming that their family is in good condition. This fact has immense potential to generate a wider spread of the pandemic virus. According to the previous subject, the study will further discuss the Indonesian regulations concerning the protection of patient confidentiality during the pandemic and the legal status for those responsible for taking the pandemic-suspected patient in force. This study hopefully will be contributing to the prevention of such actions mentioned above. This study uses a normative legal approach with secondary data research. The study results show that the broad society merely understands that the confidentiality of patient privacy only applies in normal circumstances and does not apply during the pandemic situation. Moreover, the forced withdrawal of pandemic-suspected patients occurs due to society's general prejudice towards the suspected patient. Therefore, this study argues that social awareness regarding the protection of patient confidentiality is necessary to increase social knowledge about patients' rights.