Policy Tag: Practice

Adopted as a Council Resolution by the 194th WMA Council Session, Bali, Indonesia, April 2013,
adopted by the 64th WMA General Assembly, Fortaleza, Brazil, October 2013
and reaffirmed by the 217th WMA Council Session, Seoul (online), April 2021
and by the 229th WMA Council Session, Montevideo, Uruguay, April 2025

 

Ensuring patient safety and quality of care is at the core of medical practice. For patients, a high level of performance can be a matter of life or death. Therefore, guidance and standardisation in healthcare must be based on solid medical evidence and has to take ethical considerations into account.

Currently, trends in the European Union can be observed to introduce standards in clinical, medical care developed by non-medical standardisation bodies, which neither have the necessary professional ethical and technical competencies nor a public mandate.

The WMA has major concerns about such tendencies which are likely to reduce the quality of care offered, and calls upon governments and other institutions not to leave standardisation of medical care up to non-medical self selected bodies.

Adopted as a Council Resolution by the 189th WMA Council Session, Montevideo, Uruguay, October 2011, adopted by the 62nd WMA General Assembly, Montevideo, Uruguay, October 2011
and reaffirmed by the 217th WMA Council Session, Seoul (online), April 2021

 

National medical associations are established to act as representatives of their physicians, and to negotiate on their behalf, sometimes as a trade union or regulatory body but also as a professional association, representing the expertise of medical doctors in relation to matters of public health and wellbeing.

They represent the views of the medical profession, including attempting to ensure the practice of ethical medicine, the provision of good quality medical care, and the adherence to high standards by all practitioners.

These associations may also campaign or advocate on behalf of their members, often in the field of public health.  Such advocacy is not always welcomed by governments who may consider the advocacy to have oppositional politics attached, when in reality it is based upon an understanding of the medical evidence and the needs of patients and populations.

The WMA is aware that because of those advocacy efforts some governments attempt to silence the medical association by placing it’s own nominated representatives into positions of authority, to subvert the message into one they are better able to tolerate.

The WMA denounces such action and demands that no government interferes with the independent functioning of national medical associations.  It encourages governments to understand better the reasons behind the work of their national medical association, to consider the medical evidence and to work with physicians to improve the health and well being of their populations.

Adopted by the 49th WMA General Assembly, Hamburg, Germany, November 1997
and rescinded and archived by the 59th WMA General Assembly, Seoul, October 2008
* This document has been replaced by the “WMA Statement of Access of Women and Children to Health Care” 

PREAMBLE

For years women and girls in Afghanistan have been suffering increasing violations of their human rights; In 1996 a general prohibition was introduced on practice by women, which affected more than 40,000 women. Human rights organisations call this a “human rights catastrophe” for the women in Afghanistan. Women are completely excluded from social life, girls’ schools are closed, women students have been expelled from universities, and women and girls are stoned in the street. According to information from the United Nations on the human rights situation in Afghanistan (February, 1996) the prohibition on practice affects first of all women working in the educational and health sectors. In particular female doctors and nurses were prevented from exercising their profession. Although the health sector was on the brink of collapse under these restrictions, they have been eased only slightly. Without access to female doctors female patients and their children have no access to health care. Some female doctors have been allowed now to exercise their profession, but in general only under strict and unacceptable supervision (US Department of State, Afghanistan Report on Human Rights Practices for 1996, January 1997).

RECOMMENDATION

Therefore, the World Medical Association urges its national member associations to insist and call on their governments :

  • to condemn roundly the serious violations of the basic human rights of women in Afghanistan; and,
  • to take worldwide action aimed at restoring the fundamental human rights of women and removing the provision prohibiting women from practising their profession.
  • to insist on the rights of women to adequate medical care across the whole range of medical and surgical services, including acute, subacute and ongoing treatment.