Description

In legal arena, the adage ‘ignorance of law is no excuse’ is well known; still ignorance and lack of awareness about law in general is widespread. When it comes to health laws, ignorance of law seems to be worse—even health professionals seem to have little knowledge and awareness about health laws. In this study, we investigated a host of issues regarding health laws and their implementation status by collecting first hand data from stakeholders. Moreover, the overall health system, its coordination, health budget, the issues of corruption, mental health, medical negligence, safety measures during corona pandemic were also explored in this study. We employed face-to-face interviews as a method of data collection, and conducted thematic analysis of the qualitative data (QDA). The main findings include abysmal knowledge and awareness of health laws among healthcare workers, wide consensus about low quality of health system among stakeholders, acute lack of coordination and presence of corruption, lack of budget and quality manpower including nurses and supporting staff, necessity of a medical negligence law and mental health laws, low confidence on BMDC, inadequate distribution of safety equipment in public hospitals compared to their private counterparts, low quality of nursing education etc. Finally, we made some recommendations based on our findings.

Key words: Health law, Bangladesh, Covid-19, healthcare, health system.