A tájékoztatási kötelezettség megsértéséből eredő egészségügyi polgári jogi igények bírói megítélése, kvantitatív alapú összehasonlító elemzése (2008–2010 és 2018–2020)
Őri Adrienn
Health Sciences
Dr. Nagy Zoltán Zsolt
SE Egészségtudományi Kar, Vas u. 17. 504.sz. terem
2026-06-09 11:00:00
Interdisciplinary applied health sciences
Dr. Vingender István
Dr. Feith Helga
Dr. Élő Gábor
Dr. Boda-Balogh Éva
Dr. Kovács József
Lipienné Dr. Krémer Ibolya
Dr. Barzó Tímea
This dissertation examines one of the defining areas of medical liability litigation: the judicial assessment of claims arising from breaches of the duty to inform, analysed within a historical, international, and empirical framework. The research is grounded in the premise that the protection of patients’ right to self-determination—particularly the requirement of informed consent—is a legal institution with deep historical roots, the contemporary content of which has been shaped primarily by international and European legal developments, as well as by the growing prominence of an autonomy-based patient model.
The objective of the study was to explore how, between the periods 2008–2010 and 2018–2020, the legal qualification of breaches of the duty to inform evolved; how the role of different legal consequences—namely pecuniary damages, non-pecuniary damages, and annuities—changed; and how the judicial logic underlying the award of non-pecuniary damages developed, based on an analysis of published court decisions (N = 193). Guided by clearly defined hypotheses, the study examines the relationship between adjudicatory levels, the specific characteristics of multi-plaintiff proceedings, and differences across medical specialties, with particular emphasis on obstetrics and gynaecology.
The methodology is based on a full-text qualitative and quantitative content analysis (SPSS 25.0) of final court judgments. This approach enabled a comparative examination of the types of legal violations identified, associated infringements of patient rights, temporal factors, and the nominal amounts claimed and awarded, as well as their real value adjusted to the minimum wage. Particular attention was devoted to the separate analysis of obstetrics and gynaecology as a high-risk specialty exhibiting distinctive litigation patterns.
The results indicate that, between the examined periods, Hungarian judicial practice has undergone a substantive shift from a professional-fault-centred approach towards a patient-centred, autonomy-based interpretative model. Breaches of the duty to inform have come to be recognised as independent violations of personality rights, to which non-pecuniary damages are attached as a stable legal consequence. The practice of awarding non-pecuniary damages has not become uniform; rather, it has become increasingly polarised, with a widening range of awarded amounts, while judicial discretion has remained strongly case specific.
Overall, the dissertation concludes that breaches of the duty to inform have by now become a central, norm-shaping element of medical liability litigation. In empirically verifiable ways, they influence judicial practice and contribute both to the effective enforcement of patient rights and to greater predictability in the application of the law.
