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Dr Ernest Owusu-Dapaa

Former Research Student

Ernest Owusu-Dapaa

Research overview

My research interests in relation to my current PhD programme include the exploration of health care law/ medical law/ health law as a distinct body of law in England and Wales  and the potential lessons that can be drawn in relation to Ghana. The relatiosnhip betwen law and medicine has undergone complex changes culminating in the emergence of a discrete field of law in this jurisidiction in the last four decades. The protection of patients' rights and their empowerment in the wake of fundamental changes in societal attitudes towards medicine are crucial in this context. Greater accountability is demanded of health care professionals as medical advances progresses in leaps and bounds to the extent that the bieothical values that define us as humanity are increasingly challange. In all these, a search for solution is compounded by increasing diversity in society with its attendant moral pluralism. It is the law which serves as instrument of mediation in these dilemmas. However, the traditional branches of law cannot speak to these new scenarios of bioethical dilemas without bending or adaptation of conventional principles of the law.  The two jurisdictions, England and Wales and Ghana have legal systems which belong to the common law tradition. Substantial components of Ghana legal system is a product of legal transplant or borrowing in the colonial context from the former. However, Ghanaian law does not appear to have a distinct field which addresses challanges presented by medicine and medical advances as done by HCL in England and Wales. Thus, through the prism of functional comparative law analysis I seek to explore the presence or absence of functional equivalent of HCL ( developed now in England and Wales) in Ghana for addressing legal and bioethical challanges in medicine and medical advances.  

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