Young People Seeking Vaccination Without Parental Consent: The Legal, Ethical and Clinical Practice Issues Faced by Service Providers During COVID-19
Paula O’Brien1, Melbourne Law School Carlton 1Melbourne Law School, Carlton, VIC, Australia
Abstract
Young people aged 12-17 years face barriers to accessing health care to meet their needs. The age of ‘majority’ in most Australian jurisdictions is 18 years, and those under 18 years are assumed to lack legal competence to consent to health care interventions. This strict position is softened slightly, as the common law has developed a test to allow those under 18 years of age to make decisions about some aspects of their own health care if they are assessed by the health care provider as ‘Gillick-competent’ to provide consent. However, there still appear to be serious problems with young people accessing immunisations when they lack parental consent. We define a lack of parental consent in our project as situations where: (1) the young person is seeking the vaccination without informing the parent of their desire for vaccination; (2) the parent/carer has refused to consent to the young person having a vaccination; and/or (3) the parents/carers are in dispute with each other about the young person accessing a vaccination. This paper reports on results from our project of a survey of doctors and pharmacists involved in providing the COVID-19 vaccine to young people who lacked parental consent. It canvasses the legal and ethical challenges that the practitioners faced in deciding whether and how to provide the vaccine to young people. It uses the results to make preliminary suggestions for changes to law and clinical practice to better support practitioners and to open up access to care for young people.
Biography
Paula O’Brien is an Associate Professor, the Co-Director of the Health Law and Ethics Network, and the Co-Director of Health and Medical Law Masters at Melbourne Law School. She researches in public and global health law, in particular the commercial determinants of health, access to health care, and infectious disease prevention and response.